25” x 31” x 25”
When was this piece created? May 2021
What is the story behind this piece? I started this piece at the beginning of the pandemic and right after I came out of an outpatient program for mental health (the last group/social activity I did before lockdown). It is about the experience of living with bipolar disorder and the depressive state of being. I created this piece after going through a several year hiatus from art making due to a deep depressive episode. (Manic) Depressive (When the Party’s Over) encapsulates the feeling of the expulsion of energy and the feeling of exhaustion that depression causes. I can’t make art when I am in this state I am depicting. When I was making this piece I was in a state of good mental health and was able to reflect on my own psychology.
What inspired this piece? Is there an outside element that influenced this piece (i.e. another artist, nature, a novel, a theory, etc)? The main factor that inspired this piece was simply the word and feeling of “drained” – I started to think of how that might be depicted in a more conceptual way while integrating my wood elements into it and it led me to what I have now.
Is this part of a series; if so what is the series? Explain/Tell us anything else you would like us to know about this specific work. This piece is part of a series of works titled An Anatomy of Melancholy. I look at my several-year mental health hiatus as research for these works and have made it an empowering factor in my life rather than a downside. This series incorporates topics of mental health, neurodivergence and queer identity. The following is an excerpt from my statement for this series:
“The wood becomes viscera and flesh, a self-portrait.
Wood has no gender and is a material metaphor for queer identity. Much of the wood A.M. uses are sections that have been damaged when the tree was alive and then began to heal. Others are the roots of the tree- the base support, and the main mode of sustenance. A.M. paints the wood to reference flesh and viscera. The work exists in a liminal space between healing and freshly wounded.
Neurodivergent, Mentally ill, and gender non-conforming people are pressed to function in a system that causes them harm by pressuring them to conform to ‘normalcy’. They are in a perpetual state of tending to psychic wounds that remain in flux and are never allowed to heal or exist as they are.”
A.M. Disher
Website: https://www.amdisher.com/
Instagram: @amdisher