How anxiety is lived
Anxiety is in most cases invisible, personal and fluid. That’s why it is difficult to empathize with the fear of another or understand it. When I talk about anxiety, it is often put aside or recommended to visit a specialist. Making it difficult to just talk and share your feelings. While feeling heard and understood is so important with (working on) mental health.
This project will be a way for me to work through the feelings of anxiety, stress and nervousness and support others to do so too. I want anxiety to become more normal to share and talk about. Creating work that people could relate to in their own ways. By making this feeling visible and sharable, we can start acknowledging, getting help, feel understood and it can improve our mental health.
I would like to use a fun and friendly way to achieve this. By creating workshops, toolkits and maybe even a space to answer questions with paint in abstract ways, people can move their body in a meditating and relaxing way. Visible reacting on your feelings instead of keeping everything inside your body and mind.
My first experiences included painting on one paper for two weeks. Every day I added a new element based on how I felt that day. Building layers, erasing, transforming and shining through what happened before. Painting this helped me understand my feelings betters, but also worked relaxing and meditating, I used it as a break from the stress.
The next step in my project was doing surveys. The participants gave me positive feedback that they felt heard, liked the questions and that they are happy to see some care about anxiety and how it influence them. I decided to combine the questioning with painting as a relaxing medium and created small workshops. In these workshops participants could respond to questions/assignments by making abstract paintings. Which will lead to my final outcome later on.
