A Guide to Depressive Illness
April 2007
12cm x 20cm x 3cm
Description
A hardback book found in a charity shop with the title ‘A Guide to Depressive Illness’ printed in gold letters on the blue-black front cover.
Recovered in blue velvet with golden butterfly motif.
Book pages dyed, cut, stitched and collaged with fabrics in blues.
Themes, Comments and Storylines
The Blues. Text about sadness overlaid with the feel of it. Text not eliminated, but obscured, trapped amongst the pages, forced into the background.
There is no difference between a written text on happiness or sadness. The book on depression does not feel heavier in the hand than that on happiness, the pages look, smell, feel the same. The text is an abstraction from its subject, a guide to depressive illness from a detached perspective. Ignoring weight as a quantity, heaviness here is perceived through the colour and texture.
Book re-covered in dark blue velvet fabric with an in-woven flowery pattern that appears and moves with the angle of the light, an unstable and shifting reflection. The blue pulls the gaze towards an inner distance, the velvet is cool and smooth to the touch when the movement of the hand follows the pile, stiff, resistant, almost spiky when it goes against it. There is no softness, no yielding to the touch, no comfort, just a sliding movement into one direction and marked effort in going the other way.
There is beauty to the eye, almost a temptation, a promise. The butterflies, symbol of life cycles, but also unsteadiness have been petrified by the Midas touch – to the touch the gold feels like cement. The book is tied up with a ribbon of black lace, the fabric of mourning, passion, sexuality. I am seeing in my mind the black lace ‘mantillas’ worn by Spanish women during the Holy Week processions, beauty and spirituality, death and desire.
Depression of the spirit as well as body and mind.
Does sadness follow a sequence, chronologically or otherwise? The safety blanket on the last page could also be at the beginning or appear in the middle, or indeed not be read as a safety blanket at all. The pages are framed at both ends in the grey packaging felt where fabrics end up when their life is over – fibres from all walks of life, of all colours of the rainbow, ending up in a grey mass of indistinction where difference is obliterated, where everything turns to dust.
There is a certain seductiveness in sadness, darkness, the blues, the sinking, even the marks left by the sharp zigzag punches of the sewing machine, the marks left by the pressure of hard, shiny beads on the soft velvet fabric, the disappearance of colour into black holes.
Pain and sorrows have their own pleasures and rewards.
"Academics turn up their noses at pleasure but they flock to the subject of pain like bees to the nectar. Perhaps, in the simulated world of post- modernity, pain alone seems to provide the sharp taste of reality for which our jaded palates long."
Classen, Constance (2005) (Ed.), The Book of Touch, Berg, Oxford, New York 2005, p. 109
Sad art is easier to make than happy one. Sadness seems to imply depth, happiness superficiality.
In the pages of the book, the sorrows of the world lie next to the anxieties of the soul, connected through the gaze of the eye, the touch of the finger, both distant and close.