“For my whole life I didn’t think I existed” (quote from Joker, 2019)

I watched the spell-binding movie, Joker, a film so intense that it actually makes you feel you are inside the head of the troubled character Arthur, as he slowly slips into insanity. His life is played out as a horror story – the lonely misfit who descends into his own delusional world. Seeing the world from the eyes of madness is an interesting, and scary place to be. In the case of Arthur, as his mental stability unravels, he becomes more of the victim of society, but at the same time, he becomes the perpetrator of violent acts which are a result of his losing his grip on the reality of living in a so-called civilised society.

When I think about my own art practice, I like to incorporate research and ideas that make me feel slightly uncomfortable with the purpose that I can make artwork which makes the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable. Mental illness often makes people feel not comfortable.

Madness in Art History can focus on the perpetrator getting the outcome they deserve, as in Tom Rakewell in William Hogarth’s morality tale, A Rake’s Progress, where the madness of Tom becomes slightly comedic and portrayed as an outcome that he brought on himself due to his immoral actions.

The mental state of the perpetrator can lead to their downfall, as I found in Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Tell-Tale Heart. The insanity of the narrator grows as the guilt he feels about a murder he has committed reaches breaking point. The guilt manifests itself as the ticking of a pocket watch that was buried with its victim under the floorboards of the house. So in this case, it is as if the murderer believes that his crime is on display and there is no way he can keep the secret any longer. The perpetrator is foiled by his own depraved mind.

So what makes the depiction of insanity frightening in art. Is it the indication that the protagonist will be in a position of power but then misuse that power as in the genre of science fiction/fantasy and horror. One of the great portrayals of this is in the TV series Hammer House of Horror. These short stories made for television portray mostly everyday people in everyday life but with an underlying current of the weird, the eerie and the supernatural. The protagonist is often seen descending into insanity – although he/she often sternly believes that they are completely sane. There is almost a dual world created in which the viewer can see the world the protagonist can see but then also the world that is the reality. It is this split vision of reality that I find the most frightening.

The presence of action through insanity is a difficult thing to portray well in art. This has led me to use a process of scaling back in my work. Often, I find the hint of an action can often have more impact than the action itself – this is, for me, still work in progress. One of the ways I have put my research into my practice is to experiment with the idea of the “normal killer”. For this I wanted to portray and everyday scene of someone having a meal alone, from the outside it looks completely normal apart from one or two things which could give a clue to the diner not being quite the person they want to appear to represent. In my artwork, A meal of avocado and leaves, I have combined absence alongside a weapon to make the viewer think about what has happened in this scene. What has the person done, and will they come back are two questions I would have when confronted with a blood-stained hammer.

I have also used the private domestic setting to show the crime scene from the perpetrator’s point of view – they have no idea the scene is being viewed and therefore will only be found out by some form of mistake, somebody stumbling across the scene, or possibly a further breakdown in their own mental health.