Mind,

the mental health charity

BA Design

Year 2

Goldsmiths, University of London

2015

For the project collaboration with Mind UK, we created Visualise. Visualise aims to remove stigma and raise awareness by the use of artbased conversations through the creation of art pieces as a means not only of art therapy but also as a means of communication between people. To enable people to indirectly speak of their issues and feelings. To demonstrate to people how normal and common having an unbalanced mental health is.

Our initial thoughts were focused around art therapy and ways in which you could express emotions through art - how representations differenciate depending on individuals’ mental wellbeing. A key inspiration in our beginning stages were Dunne and Raby, the placebo objects they created to support people with mental illnesses. The aspect of helping people through the creation of objects or art was our first objective. Additionally, we researched into abstract expressionism, particularly Pollock. Pollock created paintings in which he outpoured his own mind, which lead us to our first experiment.

Visualise

Research and Experiments

Post-Cards

By gathering people together and asking them to express their present feelings through the throwing and brushing of paint. Pollock’s experiment lead us to our main source of research and testing. We wanted to create an individual and more open way of expressing your mind and a form of portraying how your mental health looks like. Therefore, we positioned stands around the area of Goldsmiths University of London and asked people to anonymously visualise on a postcard; ‘What does your mental health look like?’ with any of the materials available. Along these drawings, we asked people to include a short description on the back about their current mental health and their age.

Private Public Safe Spaces

Through making the postcards we realized people required intimacy and no one to be around them to fully express how they felt. Therefore we explored the idea of a safe place, how we could use it as research and how much they helped people. From this, we began posting A3 sheets of paper in toilet cubicles with questions such as ‘How are you feeling today?’ and ‘How's it going?’. The response was mainly positive, people confessed how they were really feeling inside and how well or bad their current life situation was. People use toilets as a form of safe place, people run there to hide from their problems or to vent their feelings. By manipulating these safe spaces, we are able to use them as a platform for free expression, a space to engage in conversation.

The Process

The

Event

We designed an experience in which we wanted to raise awareness, provide support and join communities together around the subject of mental health. This took place in the London Cocktail Club, on a Sunday evening.

We exhibited parts of our research as a form of educating people and providing evidence to how common it is to be suffering of anxiety, depression and so on. We developed our initial research and presented it as art work. We created box pieces with quotations taken from the confessions that people wrote in the toilet cubicles. We created an installation in which you could walk inside and be surrounded by over 50 postcards that were completed by a vast range of ages and people, suffering of mental health problems or struggling with personal issues.

We provided instructions and platforms in which people were able to express how they felt using art but not needing any specific skills to do so. Our aim with this experience and exhibition was to normalise the idea of mental health, to hopefully allow people to see this with a different perspective and aid them to be more comfortable when speaking about subjects which tend to be hidden due to shame. We want to remove the stigma around mental wellbeing in a cooperative manner, hence the interactive art pieces we produced for this experience.