Documenting my mental breakdown

Eoghan O'Kelly - 2nd Year - LSAD Sculpture.

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Cardboard shoes Take 2. I made the original shoes mostly for fun but I wanted to see could I create a pair that would actually support my weight. These ones did!

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Moving on from corrugation and looking at the triangle as a source of strength.

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Looking at how light interacts with my object. I’m obsessed with the triangles of light and the way that they move. I’m finding myself quite drawn to that shape.

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I made two versions of the object in my previous post and in order to test the strength I decided to make myself some shoes. Unfortunately they collapsed instantly but I would definitely like to try and make a pair that actually works.

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Experimenting more with layering and repetition in order to build strength. I quite like how you can see through the triangular ‘windows’ of the object when it’s viewed from the side.

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My first experiments in the studio. I’m currently exploring cardboard as a material and the corrugated shape I used for my codex.

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A collection of images from my codex. I based it on an essay by writer Thomas de Quincey called ‘Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow’. Most of the codex is made up of my investigations into the concept of the three mothers which is explained by De Quincey in the essay. I also looked at the significance of the number three in mythology and the idea of the triple goddess which is a central tenet of modern Wicca.

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WHITE SERIES

I immersed the dandelions in white acrylic and arranged them on a canvas. The paint has really changed everything about the dandelions and it’s almost hard to believe that they were living, growing plants at one stage.

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I had previously dried out the dandelions which I uprooted for my physical intervention project and tried to bleach them to turn them white. White is something I see as being cold, emotionless, sterile and generally lacking life which I why I wanted to use the dead dandelions. The bleach didn’t really work so I ended up using acrylic paint.

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YELLOW SERIES

These are the drawings which came about as a reaction to that dream I had. They capture the ominous and uneasy feeling which I get from the colour yellow. It was partially inspired by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’

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PINK SERIES

Pink is my favourite colour and I find myself constantly drawn to it. I often think about how much I would love to be in a space where I am surrounded completely by pink, so I decided to make one with the help of photoshop. I also brought my doll-self back for a quick chat in this new pink room.

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Spooky dream Had a dream involving MKUltra, I was a woman who was being controlled. She loved horror so she bought this cassette thing that promised to be super scary and then she almost threw herself off a window ledge. Also remember seeing myself as her boyfriend and she nearly stabbed a broken bit of railing into my snapped leg. At the end people came to arrest her for animal abuse?(there was a dog that then unzipped itself to reveal a human, but the real reason she was seeing jailed was because she managed to resist MKUltra.) Also the image of a woman in a yellow 50s/40s style dress with either h r husband or her dog was imprinted on my mind when I woke up. What is this obsession I have with yellow lately? The building the dream woman tried to jump from was completely yellow as well. I feel like it started with that centre pompidou leaflet. Also in case I forget, this whole dream sequence was the second half of my full dream, I can’t remember the first half but I know the image of the woman in the yellow dress carried on from there. Also I just saw a bright yellow bleach bottle in the bathroom and felt a pang of fear. Snapchat is also yellow. What does this mean??????

This is what I wrote down immediately after waking up from a dream I had about the colour yellow a few weeks ago. It’s always been my least favourite colour and it often shows up in my dreams with negative associations. I never understood how people equate it with happiness because to me there is something overbearing and somewhat sinister about it.

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Philip Guston (American, 1913-1980), Untitled, 1971. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 76.2 x 99 cm.

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Philip Guston is an artist who uses colour in a way that I respond to. He often features pink heavily in his work but he uses it in a non-traditional way. I see pink as a representation of mania and obsession and I feel that Guston sees it in a similar way.

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Video of me sealing myself into the pod. It was quite nice to sit inside it and observe the world through the coloured nets.

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Process of making my pod. I decided to use these leftover fruit nets I had collected for another project as I liked the vibrant colours and the fact that they were semi-transparent.

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While making the Goldberg machine I came up with the idea of ‘water candles’. Similarly to how candles will eventually burn down to nothing, all the water will eventually drip out of the bottles.

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One of the many attempts I made to get this thing to work. 😭