I’m not sure when this happened. Used to be, my quilts were pictorial. Now, they are emotional. Apparently, I haven’t been in a happy emotional place in more than four years. During those years, my quilts were about suicide, frustration with neurologists who refused to listen to me, isolation, depression and sexual assault.
Fury.
It’s hard to get everything in one photo. The quilt says: If you touch this without my permission, I will break your fucking arm.
Suicide.
Depression.
Isolation.
Mass shooting.
My quilts went from having beads, buttons, couched fancy threads to unadorned, stark quilts. The one exception is the quilt I made for human physiology.
Lots of beads and lots of whimsy on that quilt. The quilt is about my biology journey starting as an undergrad in 1977 and continuing during the last fall semester.
One happy quilt didn’t stave off a massive, all-encompassing depressive episode that left me so desperate, I considered electric shock treatments which I know are barbaric. During the last three years, my writing has become increasingly depressing. I write about suicide. I write impassioned pieces, which will never be shared while I’m alive, that are an attempt to calm the emotional roiling inside me. I write about the frustrations of having a mental illness in a world that still stigmatizes mental illness – an attitude that should have been dumped at the end of the Dark Ages.
Dark subjects started appearing in my work in 2007. I was going through hell at work – a hell caused by a lunatic supervisor who kept trying to force me to quit. Around that time, I started making dark ceramic art. Bowls with words written on them: I’m a nice person, why don’t they like me? If I stay small and quiet, maybe they won’t hit me. A ceramics classmate looked at the bowls, said they were pretty. Then she looked at what was written on the bowls. And walked away.
Self-portrait ceramic sculpture entitled: Fuck You, I’m Still Alive. Complete with bullet holes.
I tell people that art is a snapshot of a tiny piece of the artist at the time the art was created. Depression, isolation and suicide don’t seem to be tiny pieces of me. I knew that depression was a constant emotion while I was growing up. I didn’t realize, because I chose not to look, how overwhelming depression is now.
I tell people that I frequently don’t understand what I’m feeling until the feelings come out of my hands. When are those feelings going to be happy again? Or were those feelings never happy?
My on-line store, Deb Thuman Art, is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com
My Spoonflower store is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
I’m linking with Nina Marie here: http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com
Deb's Art 