Mixed media on torn watercolour paper, 14 x 21cm, 2000-2017:

 This wonky, textured painting expresses my very own sense of being diagnosed (or not) a ‘psycho’. Following a brain injury in 2000, I developed a series of psychiatric illnesses, which led to long periods of incarceration in several different mental asylums. My so-called ‘illness’, which destroyed me, prompted chaotic moments of sheer, violent darkness. But these moments also burst into periods of dazzling light, when I found insight, growth and acceptance. My small painting shows a thick, black whole that has subsumed my edges, and its eruption into vision and colour. Such a transition from dark to light is made possible, I realise, through the healing powers that making art has, to help us make sense of ourselves, and the world. Making this work provides me with redemption and recognition from the darkness in the shooting rays of light, which open my psycho being into a universe of new possibilities.