S3E5 – Art and mental health, with Doll

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E: Hello, my name is Ellie.

 

W: And my name is Will.

 

E: Welcome to Lively Minds, the podcast about mental health challenges that go beyond the ebb and flow of the everyday.

 

W:The podcast that looks at how developing an understanding of our mental health challenges influences how we address them.

 

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E: So in today’s episode, Will and I are talking about art and mental health with the wonderful Doll.

 

E: Hello.

 

D: Hello. Hello.  Yes, I’m Doll. I’m here.

 

E: Thank you for coming onto the podcast. It’s lovely to have you here. It’s a bit weird that we’ve not done an episode on this already so, though, because there’s lots to unpack, so there’ll probably be quite a few episodes now. But first of all, if you would like to introduce yourself to our lovely listeners.

 

D: Yeah sure, so I’m Doll, I am a sort of, I don’t know how to describe myself as a queer disabled artist but it feels like a LOT of labels that I’m just me, I’m a ball of weirdness, I like to make stuff and I say stuff because I don’t really have one specific discipline. Within art I kind of just do whatever I feel like, I have been living with mental illness for probably about a decade now and still finding my way but believe quite strongly in kind of radical acceptance and that kind of thing. I’m non-binary, hence the queer bit. Yeah, I’m just a big bundle of weirdness that we can unpack as we go through I guess but I’ve really, really crap with it explaining or putting myself into a box because I hate them so yeah.

 

E: Fair enough! So, cause you do a lot of activism and work in like mental health, I was gonna say arena, It’s not a wrestling match in the mental health sort of area.

 

E: I wish it was, there’s a lot of people I’d like to give the people’s elbow.

 

D: Yeah.

 

E: So, I don’t know where it feels natural to start first.

 

D: I guess starting at the beginning.

 

E: Yeah, that sounds…

 

D: So I originally came up to the north of England back in 2010 after some pretty awful stuff happened. And that led to me having quite a severe breakdown. At that time, I hadn’t engaged with my art a long time, an awfully long time. So growing up, I loved creativity in all its forms, but it was kind of, not to put too far a point on it, knocked out of me as a kid and then as a teenager, and then when everything started to go very very wrong for me in terms of my own health and trusting my own instincts I guess is probably the easiest way to put it. I found that speaking words didn’t convey the complete depth of how I was feeling and so that’s when I ended up coming back to art because it felt like it was giving so many more words to what I couldn’t voice, and I realised that I’d really been denying a huge part of myself so identity, advocacy, all those things just become like massive themes within not only my life but my artwork, so again this idea of being able to give voice to some of the darker moments that that I don’t want to pathologise or analyse or intellectualise, because I’m very prone to doing that. I just want to feel it.

 

E: mmm

 

D: And so being able to do that in terms of art is like a huge liberation, I guess, if that makes sense. So yeah, that’s kind of where it all came from.

 

E: One of the first things you said was about communicating the things in a visual way or that you couldn’t, that like words just weren’t enough. Was that sort of communicating back to yourself or were you wanting to show to people that I can’t explain what is happening but look at this?

 

D: It was a bit of both. It started off being me trying to articulate how I was struggling to those around me so it definitely started off like that and then, then very quickly it became me having conversations with myself. So very, very quickly it became a way of tackling some of the more complex elements of my, what I now know as mental illness, but very much about trying to talk to and understand the inner me that was feeling so unheard and hurt and needed to be comforted I guess. And on my journey I’ve realised actually what a huge part of that and in some ways still is, is grief.

 

I think in the mental health space we don’t acknowledge the role of grief anywhere near as much as we should do. I think there’s a very linear approach to grief which is someone has past and therefore you have a certain amount of time where you do a lot of crying and then it’s all good and we can celebrate and move on. My issue has been for the longest time how do you

grieve someone that’s still alive

 

E: mmmm

 

D: or that never existed and so I grieve for the person that I wanted to be and can no longer be, and I grieve for the people in my life that are still alive that I have nothing to do with that caused me the harm. So that a lot of the conversations end up being quite heavily impacted by that kind of grief.

 

W: That’s fascinating and I think we need to unpack that but before we do would you mind just taking us through some examples of your artistic practice and some of the projects that you’ve done?

 

D: Yeah sure, so in terms of my main um vehicle I guess, my main mode of expression is definitely journals, sketchbooks and doodling. Very instinctive, a mix of the visual and the written but with, but the focus isn’t on the written word. So although I talk about not being able to articulate, as I start to sketch and doodle, often words will present themselves to me that feel important. And so there’s always an element of typography or font to what I do. Sometimes that can be found objects so I do a lot of instinctive, kind of, small scale sculpture with found objects so like doctor’s letters and case notes and stuff like that intrigue me. The idea of taking someone else’s words about me and turning them into something that feels… mine is quite empowering to me. So I have lots and lots and lots and lots of sketchbooks. I always tend to be drawn to doodling portraiture but not traditional portraiture, more the idea of the face in motion or emotion. So I’ve done quite a few, let’s say, figure work drawings of people caught mid-scream or I’ve actually done a series of portraits of women mid-orgasm.

 

E: Oh I’ve not seen that.

 

D: Yeah so, it interests me the idea of capturing emotion on the face mainly because, and I’ve been told this many times over my life although I might stay quiet my face tells the story of how I’m feeling and I can’t hide that, so that has its own challenges. In terms of the other things creatively rather than just with the linear idea of art, I do an awful lot of crochet and I will quite openly talk about how crochet saved my life because it did, and fabric or should I say tactile textiles tend to come up in my work a lot as well and that’s mainly because my original path when I left school was in fashion design. I’m actually trained in corsetry and that’s the idea of like pattern cutting and corsetry again, has this idea of gender

 

E: mmm

 

D: And you know yeah so I’m a bit of a witch walker’s board of different ideas and for everyone that I say I’ve got about 20 million floating around in my head. It’s a very noisy place to live sometimes.

 

[laughter]

 

D: So, so yeah.

 

E: You said that crochet saved your life and it’d be nice to hear about how crochet did that, but also just for the listeners who can’t see you at the moment. Doll’s got these amazing tattoos on their hands that say, one hand says warp and the other says weft.

 

D: Weft, yeah. I have warp and weft on my hands and I’ve wanted that for a very long time and I’ve actually only written fairly recently I guess like a year ago had that done and the reason being is. So to give a bit of context so all fabric is made up of two main strands. So you have the warp which runs north to south and the weft which runs east to west, is the easiest way to kind of say it and all fabric everything that you are wearing or sat on that is made up of some kind of fabric has that structure. And for me life is made up of lots and lots of strands. For me life is made up of lots of strands and they all interconnect to make this one cloth and then you get to choose how to manipulate or translate that and sometimes it’s comfort, sometimes it’s armour.

 

And so having warp and weft on my hand is a reminder that I’m the one that gets to choose how that cloth is um used or interpreted. And so it’s, its’ kind of an ongoing thing. And then round the edges are like a running stitch and pins. So it’s meant to look almost like applique. And a lot of my tattoos, so I have quite a lot of tattoos for people who can’t see me. I think maybe 14 at last count with more planned. A theme around a lot of them is stitching and this idea I call myself a work in progress and I think it’s important to feel for me, that my story isn’t done and that, that feeds into some of my experiences around not wanting to be here anymore and stuff like that. So the idea that I’m, I’m still here and I get to unpick bits and restitch bits, and put in new fabrics and new colours wherever I want to.

 

E: That is such a beautifully explained metaphor.

 

D: Yeah, it’s, it’s incredibly important to me, the idea of the fabric of life and weaving your own path. It’s become really central to a lot of my artwork, which is why I like fabric and taking what you’re handed and reshaping it has become part of my practice, you know, when it comes to like sculpture and stuff like that.

 

And coming back to crochet and how it saved my life. So in order to explain, because it sounds like hyperbole and I get that because a lot of people are like “Oh, it’s such a, such a, save my life, you know, I should try this, revolutionary!” You know, I think everyone’s got that one thing that no matter when they come back to it. It always makes them feel at home or held,

 

E: Yeah

 

D: and that can be lots of different things. So for example for my partner, that’s karate. I don’t get that I don’t want to go and get sweaty and kick things. I know I want to kick things sometimes but not like that. I don’t want to get up a half-five on a Sunday morning and go doing that kind of thing. No thank you!

 

Crochet came to me at a particularly low point in my mental health journey. I had been on waiting lists for a long time. I had not gone out of the house for a long time. I couldn’t engage with any, let’s say live media, because triggers were there all the time and the triggers were decimating for me at the time as well. So I would spend an awful amount of time on YouTube watching random inane crap or rewatching my favourite animation shows because again that, I knew those, they were comfortable and they were light-hearted so I didn’t have to think. Somebody suggested to me “oh well why don’t you do your art?” and at that time somebody had given me one of these adult colouring books and I was just like “Okay, I’ll give it a go”. And I found myself really harshly judging like where I was putting shading and what colour and da da da. And then I remember looking up like YouTube videos and it’s like all these people like “how you should adult colour” and I’m like, surely this is completely the antithesis of what this is meant to be.

 

E: Yeah.

 

D: Like, you know, if you seriously, I urge anyone after this, go and have a look at just how many tutorials there are colouring in. It’s like, what are we doing anyway? So I kind of got really frustrated. But what I did realise is that I was denying my creativity because of the judgments. So every time I tried to make art, certain people’s voices were in my head about how it wasn’t good enough and what you’re doing. It’s pointless. It’s frivolous. You know, be more productive, go do something useful and all that kind of stuff. And a friend of mine who was an illustrator but lives in Italy, literally just said, “Why don’t you try crochet?” or something that is more pick up and put down and, you know, you can just muck about. And they sent me a picture of an amazing…some people call it a plushie in the crochet world they’re called Amagurumi, but basically they’re little toys. And it was an amazing dragon and it was so intricate and I hadn’t ever seen anything like that in crochet before. I thought granny squares and doilies and, you know. And it completely captured me. And I was determined to master this technique to make this thing. And that’s where my love affair started because I, rather than judging myself and spending time, you know, really feeling bad. I started to play around with a yarn and a hook and I could pick it up, put it down. I could do it on the sofa when I felt awful. I could do it in the car and we were out and about. And I just kept remaking this one particular bit because I couldn’t make it work. And it was, and then I was like, I’m not gonna let it, you know, stubborn me kicked in. And then it just became like a thing with me against the yarn. And I realised in following a pattern, the rhythmic formula of somebody telling me what to do, but it’s still being creative was what I’d missed. And I guess some people might find that in like, um, you know, paint by numbers and stuff like that. It’s like guided creativity. But for me,

 

E: It’s almost like you’re being held.

 

D: Yeah, yeah. It’s almost like, you know, if you go bowling, you’ve got the bumpers on. It’s like you still get to play, but you don’t have to worry about screwing it up.

 

E: Yeah.

 

D: So that’s where I started with it. And I realised quite quickly that I was calm. And because I was focused, it was, I call it meditation for fidgets. Because I can’t do meditation. Someone says to me think and I’m like “no that’s the worst thing nope that’s what I’m trying to avoid why would you want me to do that?” and being quiet is difficult because my brain is never quiet,

 

E: yeah

 

D: So how can I be quiet if everything around me can be absolutely deathly quiet but my brain is not, so crochet became that thing where I was like meditatively, and I didn’t realise this but you know rhythmically making stitches, but the tactile nature of yarn in my hand as well and evolving something creating something, making something in real time that if I didn’t like it and this is a wonderful thing about anything when you work with yarn, if I didn’t like it all I had to do was pull the thread and it would not be there anymore and I could just start again yeah it was amazing

 

E: Yeah there is something amazing about that.

 

D: Yeah it was just, and it also is affordable because being able to crochet hooks at a couple of quid and you can get yarn in most pound shops and it’s fine to work with to play with and again, you’re manipulating, creating your own, so sometimes when I’m bad I’m like fine I’ll make my own rainbow but I genuinely mean that because there’s stuff around me that if I’m feeling bad and I want comfort I can make myself a plushie if I’m cold I can

make myself a blanket if I want to show love to someone else I can make them something that I know that they’ll like

 

E: That’s so brilliant

 

W: I love the meditation for fidgets, that’s brilliant I so, I so identify with that

 

E: Yeah I think it’s such a good point, that also I just wanted to pick up on that it’s portable.

 

D: Yes.

 

E: Because that’s what I always, I’ve been teaching myself textiles because I just really like it and I always have like a small version of either embroidery or like little hexagons in a little Tupperware box in my bag just in case I need to sit and fidget.

 

D: Yep it is so cool because you can, like I’ve been at conferences and stuff where you know I’m really overwhelmed and all I need to do is just go in my bag and get a little small bit of yarn and sometimes when I’m really really bad and I can’t do that I’ll even use, I’ll finger crochet and literally just like grab something, because it’s that idea of focusing on what’s in front of you but it’s also very, again not to sound too kind of twee, but it’s ‘very grounding but it is

 

E: It is though yeah

 

D: what it makes you do is to be there in the moment and think about the thing that you’re engaging with and whenever some people have put that to me in kind of more medicalised or clinicalised ways I’ve just been like “no”’ but when you put it into that context, also for me, as somebody that does tend to analyse or over-intellectualise things it has a purpose, you know, so sitting still for 10 minutes and kind of like doing the whole “um” thing, if that’s for you, fantastic. But for me it’s like I could be doing so many other things and I feel guilty. Whereas if I’m making something then that part of my brain shuts up because it’s like no we’re doing something.

 

E: Yeah I definitely have that as well.

 

D: Yeah it does shut up because like nope, we’re doing something – that’s fine. We’re being productive, awesome.

 

W: Hi everyone, just to say that Lively Minds is led by people with lived experience and mental health challenges and record it entirely in their spare time. Please help us out by rating or reviewing our show on your podcast app, or if you’d rather spread the word in a more low-fi way, tell a few people about lively minds. It really helps to grow our show.

Talking of which, let’s head back there right now.

 

W: I’m really interested by what you said earlier about grief, and the reason,  one of the reasons I’m really interested is because just two episodes ago we did a feed share with a podcast that focuses on how to do life story work with care-experienced children and young people. And the interviewee was a drama therapist who was talking about grief, but not in the bereavement or, or sort of death of somebody context, but much more from the experience of being separated from your birth family. So it was kind of reframing grief in a way that I think we just don’t hear referred to very often.

 

D: No we don’t, we don’t and it is my opinion a lot of the work that I’ve done in more, the activist advocacy and research space, that a huge part of mental distress, I’m not I’m not a fan of the term mental health because it infers something that I’m not comfortable with. So when we talk about distress and pain, it’s very easy to repackage it and say, “Oh, you know, recovery and health.” It, you know, and we always go and make the assimilation to physical health. And it’s not the same. It doesn’t have a linear approach. It’s not do X, Y, Z, and you’ll end up here. It’s not a destination to be reached. And I think the second people let go of recovery being this bastion of wonderful saviour, they’ll be a lot better off because it wasn’t until I basically went, you know what, my experiences, and my experiences, I can’t undo them. What I can do is choose how I want to engage with them. And being able to name that as grief was really important. Because we don’t, we don’t allow people the time and space to grieve.

 

You know, I’m 46 now and I love my life, I absolutely do, which is quite a lot for me to say considering all the stuff that I’ve been through. But to say that it’s what I chose, no, it’s not, this isn’t what I chose. When I was a child, growing up, what I wanted was to be a fashion designer. I studied hard. I was intelligent, but I was constantly told that I wasn’t, you know, none of this is what I chose. And so being able to grieve what the person I wanted to be has been pivotal. Being able to grieve the parents that I am estranged from, my choice, has been huge. They’re still here, but there will be a point in my life when they won’t be here and I won’t know. That’s hard, you know, living in a world where we have this tribal cultural approach to family that is like, you know, blood is thicker than water and… again, that, that saying is much wider than that one line and it’s actually been misinterpreted hugely. It keeps us in situations and families that are not good for us because of the fact that we’re supposed to. And this idea of grieving who we wanted to be, who we were, what we don’t get to be, is really important. And I think it is a huge step on the way to understanding and comforting that person inside that has the distress.

 

W: Do you feel that you’ve been able to grieve through your art? And if so, has that helped?

 

D: I’ve definitely been able to grieve through my art because what it’s done is it’s given me points to refer back to. So I might not necessarily understand why I’ve made something at the time, but then I’ll look back and I’ll be like, “oh yeah, that makes sense”. So there’s a lot of stuff that I have gone through and understood through the lens of art that maybe my brain just couldn’t access in the more, “oh, I need help for X, what is it?”.So a lot of my treatment has been based around imagery, so even coming up with mental imagery, so rather than having traumatic incidents and thinking about them in Technicolor, which is difficult. I have like snapshots of like, key moments and so they’re like photos in my mind and I can engage with the photo and through engaging again and again with the photo and unpacking it, it loses its colour and so therefore it loses its vibrancy and loses its impact. So that’s something that has been really helpful to me. Having these really, it’s almost like turning down the volume on it, it’s still there but I get to choose if I want to, you know, turn up the volume or mute it. And again, I can’t eradicate any of that. And in a way I don’t want to, because it’s made me who I am. But it’s not always helpful. And so if I can recognize it’s becoming unhelpful and employ one of these different strategies creatively to turn down the volume on it, or in my terms, take the colour out of it, then that’s what I want to do. And for me, there are a lot of different themes because I have a quite complex bag of triggers. Some of them really weird and nuanced and unlikely to ever come up, but you’d be surprised the things that will catch you off guard.

 

E: I also have some odd triggers.I don’t know if you use this website as well, but I always check before I watch anything on doesthedogdie.com.

 

D: I didn’t know of that website, thank you.

 

I worked, yeah.

 

E: Well, I just thought, actually, it would be good for everyone to know of this website because it’s amazing and it’s user generated but it I think it was started by someone whose dog had died and they were like hang on there aren’t triggers warnings for stuff like that happening so for every film there’s all sorts anything you can think of, like you can put them in yourself as well it’ll and,  people go into detail about whether or not that’s in there and that’s really useful

 

D: I might have to have a look at that. Well I’ll probably find myself contributing to it quite a lot because because of my triggers are quite specific it does catch me off guard when it happens and I’m watching stuff and there’s been times when I’ve just been like yeah, ‘no where did this come from’, so and again like working with artists as I do like they’ll send me stuff and go oh this is amazing thing and I’m like I’m sure it is but I can’t engage with it because the themes are not, you know. I Literally had to do that last week. Somebody sent me an amazing exhibition on motherhood and I’m like, I’m sure it’s amazing, but I can’t engage with that. That’s just something that is just, I know for me, it’s just not, maybe one day, but right now, no.

 

E: Not doable, yeah.

 

D: So it comes up all over and I guess it’s that forewarned forearmed is like a really good approach. You can’t shield yourself from everything and nor should you, you know, this if it’s coming up there’s something you’ve got to work through but there’s ways of doing it and it’s got to be on your terms. I guess the main thing I want to say is it’s got to be. Yeah on your terms in your time frame you aren’t on anybody else’s schedule like at all.

 

E: You said to me before, Doll, that for you there’s your arts practice and then there’s crochet and that crochet sits somewhere in a special place that’s kind of outside of that.

 

D: Yeah, for me having lots of different strategies is important and sometimes I’ve likened it to like a roundabout where you’ve got lots of different exit routes. And I don’t always want to take the same exit route because it isn’t always the view I want. So my art practice is varied, but it’s also a lot more public so it’s, is much more likely to be shared and it is also being real, something that will be viewed and spoken about and judged, you know, let’s be real, it’s going to be judged. We all do it, whereas my crochet is quiet, personal, intimate because even if I’m making something for someone else to give away I’m the one that had the time with the stitches. I’m the one that knows how long it took or where I was sitting when I did it or what I was watching or how I came to choose the colours. So it’s way more personal.

 

E: It’s private.

 

 

D: Yeah, and I think that’s important because I do, I have, I do put my art on like Instagram and whatever and obviously on display in exhibitions, but the crochet is for me again, even if the end product goes to someone else it’s for me, and it feels very different and there’s there is a lot more, it’s a lot more instinctive as well, which sounds weird to say considering my art is quite instinctive but my art, I guess the best way to say is my art is driven by my experience, but my crochet is driven by my comfort. So that’s like a huge, like difference.

 

E: It’s a lovely distinction, isn’t it.

 

D: Yeah. And I think sometimes in a world where we’re supposed to be 100% authentic with ourselves all of the time in every space. No, I don’t think you should be. I think there’s layers to what you should give away of yourself. It’s not appropriate for you or others to be, you know, full balls to the wall, this is me in every situation. So I have that. And I, I also have that in the fact that, you know, my artist name is Doll. My actual name is not Doll. Again, I have a difference. It’s, it’s better for me to be able to go, this is the space I’m occupying. This is the headspace I’m choosing to occupy. And then this is different. So when I’m in the artist space, I will, you know, use Doll because that is, again, it allows me a level of not anonymity, because that’s not the right word, but a level of separation from the subject, which is good for me because it keeps me safe as well.It keeps me, you know, if anybody sees anything and you’re like, oh, it doesn’t make it completely autobiographical because it’s a version of me not me.

 

E: I like that it’s like an also a bit of an indicator to others like which headspace you’re in.

 

D: Yes, absolutely.

 

E: I know when I’m like at the weekend if someone asks me something related to work I’m literally like no idea because I’m not in work mode now I, like no idea what my job is, or what I’m like, not a clue.

 

D: Exactly.

 

E: Once I’ve got the head on then it’s like all that.

 

D: Yeah I think it’s I think again it’s really important that we do that, that we aren’t performing monkeys, we’re not all seeing or dancing, we’re not like, we shouldn’t, people talk about boundaries so much and it’s like for me, boundaries isn’t the word, it’s access. People don’t get to have access to you whenever they feel like it because you can know a boundary but still sidestep it through the lens of access. So you can know that someone finishes work at five o’clock and not email them because you won’t get a response. But in this day and age, people go, “Oh, I’ll send you a WhatsApp at half five.” There’s a difference. Again, it’s about you don’t have to be on for everyone all the time.

 

E: mmmmm

 

D: And that really came up for me when I started to get more into the kind of activist advocacy research space because people engage with that output at different times and I might be into a different mode, but someone has just seen it and they’ll be like “oh did I do it” and really enthused and that’s lovely but if I’m not in that headspace…

 

E: Not today!

 

D: Exactly and then it’s navigating that and being quite strong in your own safety, you know because it’s as important as other people’s.

 

E: Thank you so much Doll it’s been amazing and there is definitely more to come if Doll would

like to come back for everything else.

 

D: If you’ll have me, yeah.

 

E: Absolutely.

 

W: Thank you so much.

 

E: Would you like us to direct people to your website or Instagram or anything in particular?

 

D: I mean if people want to come and find my work they can have a look on Instagram which is @dollwithabun. I do have a website which is creatingconversations but it’s all linked and I have a gallery on Outside In as well, but Instagram’s where I’m most active in terms of like crochet

and art.

 

W: We’ll be sure to put those links in the show notes as well

 

E: and we’ll put link to does the dog die dot com as well

 

D: yeah. I’m really, thank you that’s been amazing I’m gonna make sure I do that yeah.

 

E: Thank you for listening as always you can find us on social media at Lively Minds pod.

 

W: Make sure you subscribe to lively minds wherever you get your podcasts and tune in again next month for another episode.

 

E: Please note that this show does not constitute medical advice and is not a replacement for seeking professional help. You can find signposting to support on our new website livelymindspod.com.

 

W: Take care and bye for now

 

E: Bye!

 

[whooshing]

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