PROJECT STATEMENT - ORIGAMI

Origami is a series of images which serve to acknowledge my own mental health issues, by using some of the tools that I habitually employ to shore up a fragile sense of self while pricking at perceptions and playing with visual connections. It accepts too the sad truth that sometimes we sabotage our own efforts by attempting to mask what’s really going on, presenting one thing as another, hiding behind a carefully laid veneer of what we imagine normality must look like.

The enjoyment and satisfaction that I get from origami is through an appreciation of the materials in my hands and in the process of folding, pleating, pressing, curving, pinching, popping and playing. The end product is less important than the process even though I do enjoy the challenge of following complex instructions and quickly reach a state of flow if it's just complex enough not to be too daunting! Sometimes though, as I'm holding the paper, another direction will present itself to me and what I end up making may not be what I first intended. That's okay. Being flexible brings strength. The semi-abstract forms that result are finished when I find them pleasing enough that I want to photograph them. And I note that the act of photographing them changes them yet again. What was once a two-dimensional piece of paper, folded and manipulated into a fragile semblance of volume and space, takes on a solidity in its photographed form that was never really there. I am reminded of the deceptive nature of anxiety and depression which allows a mother to go for months not realising the pain that their child is in. The apparent robustness of an origami heart hides the empty space behind.

We live in a time when mental health is mentioned daily, if not hourly in newspapers, on television, in schools and colleges and workplaces. And yet, in the face of crisis I still feel utterly powerless.