Rapid Cycling, 2020

In this series I sought to investigate the psychological spaces I experience as a person living with bipolar disorder, and translate them into abstracted landscapes. I decided to make four pieces in total, all acrylic on wood panels with the exception of the circular piece, which is traditional stretched canvas. Each painting adheres to a mostly monochromatic color palette: grayscale, red, blue, and finally purple, which is meant to serve as a combination of all emotional spaces that come before it. I intended to use every piece as a way of processing these experiences, and typically worked on the paintings when I was “in” those spaces, whether that be mania, anxiety, or depressive and mixed episodes. I often worked on multiple pieces at once because of this, although I still continued painting when I felt neutral. By going through this exercise I feel that I garnered a better understanding of these experiences by bringing them into a tangible space, and learned that these emotions and episodes very often contain crossover points - they are rarely mutually exclusive. Rapid Cycling is defined as “a pattern of frequent, distinct episodes in bipolar disorder,” which is something I struggle with as a person with Bipolar Type II. In representation of this, the pieces are meant to be read sequentially, as this is the pattern each “cycle” typically follows for me personally - which is something I did not realize until creating this series. The landscapes themselves reflect emotions and behaviors such as repetition, paranoia, panic, dropping off, brain fog, etc. through gestural forms, application of paint, layering and use of textiles.