Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Clara Lynas

I Speak to Myself Loudly and Often

"I Speak to Myself Loudly and Often" is a multicomponent painting installation that draws from my own experiences as a young bisexual woman with self-managed mental illness. In this work I seek to explore the layered nature of personal experience, wherein the remembering of an event can become itself an embodied extension of that event. I am thinking of the body as a site of history, and of remembering as a form of reenactment. In this way I am creating a theatrically produced recounting of personal history, that is itself an extension of that history. I am seeking to discuss the complex nature of oscillating between self-isolating depression and risk-taking behaviour, but to do so in a way that embraces camp and is aware of the inherent melodrama attached to being in your own head  - a melodrama that increases when you are your own caretaker. By using my own enlarged handwriting for the text, and situating it between enormous air quotes drawn from my own hands, I am actively poking fun at myself. I am able in this way to speak honestly to the complexity of these experiences, not just as something bad or frightening, but as a fact of life that is unremarkable for many people. The duality of feeling complex and messy emotions, acting out often in unsafe ways, and yet, fully understanding that you have seen this before, you will see it again, it’s not the end of the world, and in fact – it’s really very ordinary.