Kayti Baur's hanging textile artwork. Photo: Mark Teo
Bipolar NSCAD artist sees beauty in breakdowns
Exhibit by Kayti Baur aims to be a way to "experience bipolar disorder without being too factual or scientific.”
(0)Despite what Britney Spears might have to say, Kayti Baur wants people to know that bipolar disorder isn't about shaving your head or unprovoked umbrella attacks.
"I wish her luck," said Baur, a 23-year old NSCAD student. "But that's now the stereotype (of people with bipolar disorder)."
The Halifax artist was diagnosed with the mental illness two years ago. Beauty in the Breakdown, her textiles exhibit at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, offers a snapshot into her personal struggles with bipolar disorder. The exhibit opened Nov. 3 and will run until Nov. 7.
The gallery features textiles, some three metres long, looming over viewers from ceiling to floor. Baur completed 15 pieces in total, with repeating patterns of child-like pin reels, leaves and multi-coloured pills. Each piece is dyed or screen-printed, with Baur adding water-drips, hand-painting and other techniques to disrupt the patterns.
The works - which range from vibrant to dark - were designed to allow viewers to visually experience mental illness. The results are stunning to the eye, overwhelming in their complexity and elastic in their tone.
"When you read about it in a textbook, you never get a sense of what it's like," she said, of the disorder. "It's a way to experience it without being too factual or scientific."
The textiles were arranged to display cycles that she has experienced during manic-depressive stages, such as mania, stability, transformation, and a return to mania.
"It feels continuous, like it's never going to end," she said.
Bipolar disorder misunderstood
However, despite the exhibit's efforts, Baur says that plenty of misinformation exists about mental illnesses.
"When I told people I was bipolar, they thought that I was an angsty teenager," she said. "Or they thought I was insane and wondered why I wasn't in a hospital."
Still, bipolar disorder affects more than 400,000 working aged adults in Canada, more than two per cent of that demographic, according to a report published by Statistics Canada.
Martin Alda, a professor of psychology at Dalhousie University, is a specialist in mood disorders. Alda says those with the illness can alternate between depression - moods associated with low self-esteem, fatigue, and lack of motivation - and mania, which gives people spontaneity and a heightened sense of their abilities.
He says bipolar disorder can be especially difficult for those in the creative field.
"They do things they feel are brilliant, but when they recover they realize it's poor quality," he says, which makes focusing on a single project difficult.
And medication, he says, can affect an artist's creative drive.
"Milder forms of bipolar disorder can be associated with more creativity, you think faster," he said. "Bringing these people down (with medication) may feel like being less creative for them."
A year-long project
And Baur experienced plenty of difficulties in creating Beauty and the Breakdown, the culmination of more than a year's work.
"She sometimes disappeared for long amounts of time," said Anke Fox, a friend of Baur's. "It took a lot of work."
When Baur was diagnosed, she had to take two winters away from NSCAD, which disrupted her concentration on her work.
"I had to leave school before I could get my medication under control," she said, adding that the results of her medication were unpredictable. "You don't know when something is going to come up, when your medication is going to get switched."
Since her work dealt intimately with her mental illness, she also had to constantly present her ideas to her peers - something that took plenty of courage.
"You have to get up in front of your class and say ‘I feel so horrible,'" she said. "And you can never get away from it."
Still, Baur says immersing herself in her art was a form of personal therapy. She says her art helped her talk about her illness, and that sometimes it's easier for her to express herself through her art than to talk to a therapist.
She hopes others with bipolar disorder will be able to relate to her exhibit. She also hopes to dispel the myth that bipolar disorder is linked to schizophrenia, violence and the inability to control one's emotions.
"People need to know that it's complicated, but treatable," she said. "They need to focus on the possibility of getting better."
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