TRIGGER WARNING! SENSITIVE TOPICS AHEAD
TW: implied mentions of self h/// in the context of Borderline Personality Disorder.
Telling a story
Our prompt was to ‘Tell a story in a medium of our choice.’
RESEARCH
I chose to make a looping p5.js sketch about the intersection between BPD, ADHD, C-PTSD and autism. It relates to experiences of me and my friends as this intersection is something you can almost get trapped inside. It’s a blind spot between all 4 disorders where no one can figure out exactly what you have, so you can easily be ignored by medical professionals when faced with the stigma of 4 disorders at once, all of which overlap but you don’t fit perfectly into any one in particular, rather all of them at once at once – creating this constant loop of being ignored and denied help and constantly living and dying searching for some kind of answer.
Lots of the inspiration for this piece comes from the book ‘Talking About BPD’ by Rosie Cappuccino which dwells a lot on the muddy nature of feelings surrounding navigating diagnostic pathways.
I also wanted to tell this story using objects before words. Therefore, in my final piece, there is a png overlay of items related to each stage of acceptance, based on the 5 stages of grief.
PROCESS
Since I wanted to tell all of this story through objects first and foremost, I made a mindmap of objects in each ‘stage’.
All the art in this piece is hand drawn on paper then scanned in. I made a room in Minecraft, took screenshots, and painted it.
Here’s the room. Sketches based on the room and the mindmap are as follows.
Here’s the undersketch of the painting.
The painting itself is acrylic, aided by some watercolour pigments. Scanned.
After this, I took some tracing paper and drew several objects all around the room from my mind map. Anything that didn’t come out clear, I redrew on separate paper and used. Here are the scans.
I also wrote 5 story text cards to display after the user views the room, scanned them in, and added them to all my assets. Lastly, I put it all in p5.js. Here’s the outcome.
OUTCOME
https://editor.p5js.org/spidermatsu/full/IVsA0xuHX – press ENTER to look through it all.