Mental Health, finding creative solace

2025

ArtReach St. Croix encouraged artists and viewers to consider the emotions, stigma, struggles and healing that surround mental health and how individuals impacted personally or tangentially find solace and strength. (Presented in conjunction with the NEA Big Read featuring Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here.)

“Just Keep Swimming” was a performance installation contributed to the exhibition by Victoria Bradford Styrbicki, and drawn in direct response to Kevin Wilson’s book about two young children who catch on fire. According to psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, to be “touched with fire” is a common poetic motif used to describe the artistic temperament often corresponding with manic-depressive illness. When I stumbled across Bessie and Roland’s similarly metaphoric struggle in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, I saw so many similarities to the struggles with self-security, pressure to change, longing for love and affection, understanding, all the things. Drawing from that initial reaction, my performance is grappling with the many things we hide that seem incongruent with “normal” lives—whether that’s mental illness, living in an alcoholic family, poverty, and so on. We all invent personal coping tactics which become idiosyncrasies, even cute to the outside, but truly reveal our trauma. In another connection with the book, I share one of mine with Timothy. Psychologist Adam Phillips wrote: “Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.” I will share one of my excesses with you and perhaps confront what I am hiding. What will you confront in exchange?

Date

April 3 – May 10, 2025

Place

ArtReach St. Croix, Stillwater, MN

Lead Artist

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki

Materials

Typewriter, Labels, Stuffed animals, Artist tape, Burned net, Goggles, Swim suit, Clipboard, Table

Photo

© A House Unbuilt