Duality

Duality is a collection of works by Katherine O’Connor and Emma Wolfindale. The exhibition looks at how the artists live with Bi-polar disorder. Bi-polar Disorder, traditionally known as Manic Depression, has a wide complex list of symptoms. Sufferers experience periods of severe depression and hyper mania leaving the sufferer with an altered state of reality. This collection of pieces expresses elements of their experience of living with the condition.

Wolfindale’s work is more abstract comprising of three different sets of work and the piece ‘Don’t Doubt in the Dark What is Clear in the Light”. Circles and Lines tell a story (through prints and a film) about leaving reality and coming back to it again. She started with a poem produced after a period of illness, broke the poem into lots of sections and tried to create compositions only using circles and lines to recreate the story.

Well of Emotion is a series of small paintings. Each painting started with an image of a mouth but using paint and fingers she manipulated the image to express difficult emotions, which were hard to express using words.

The last series, Blurred light, focuses on how different emotional states are transient. Just as it is impossible to capture light, so it is impossible to capture an emotion and it stay. She takes photographs on a slow exposure whilst moving the camera and these become the starting point for each painting.

Don’t Doubt in the Dark what is Clear in the Light was painted during recovery after a depression. Wolfindale found an old image of a painting with a phrase (now the title of the work) written above it. She used this to inspire her own version of the piece in an attempt to hold onto hope.

For Katherine O’Connor the creative process has always been a form of catharsis. Taxidermy is currently a crucial part of this process of Katherine’s work as it enables her to form an intimate relationship with the animal before it plays the key role in the narrative and composition.

She uses different compositions of the birds to express different emotions and states often showing the birds trapped inside death and objects or wrapped up revealing how the condition can make you feel trapped in emotional state and a life on medication is a half -life that cannot be seen directly by the world around her.

The expressions and symbolic objects attempt communicate to the viewer a range of aspects about life with Bi-polar from despair to a feeling of freedom and document her journey to becoming a Christian giving some of her images spiritual connotations adding deeper layers of meaning.