Everything I Touch Turns to Dust is a zine about life with schizoaffective disorder, a relatively rare mental illness that shares symtoms of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder, either bipolar disorder or depression.
This is probably one of the most personal pieces of work I’ve ever made but there are so many misconceptions about mental illness, especially when it comes to psychosis and schizophrenia that it had to be written. This isn’t about having a split personality or having a single violent bone in my body, it’s about coping when the world around you is turned upside down.
You can find the exhibition here: https://www.psexamination.co.uk/
Everything I Touch Turns to Dust forms part of “Present State Examination,” a group exhibition about featuring newly commissioned artworks, images and text exploring socio-cultural, interpersonal, existential or political conditions surrounding the perception and treatment of psychological, physical and neurological ‘illnesses’.
It also features new work by Louisa Martin and Bella Milroy, with opening and closing essays by Morgan Quaintance.
Louisa Martin’s ‘SOLA’ is the first of a new body of work reimagining the autistic labelled body and laying out a liberatory framework for self-seeing, outside the pathology paradigm
Bella Milroy’s ‘Breakfast’; focuses on experiences of illness and care within the domestic setting, through the stanzas of a poem written by her maternal grandmother;
