When creating the piece “Empty,” Toronto artist Julieta Christy channelled themes of vulnerability, instability and self-destruction.
These themes, she said, perfectly encapsulate her battle with depression.
“It depicts the unexplainable emotions of how scary and helpless it can feel,” Christy said. “Because you do forget there is a world beyond depression.”
“Empty” is among 10 artworks — ranging from paintings to photographs to digital illustrations — displayed prominently across 200 posters and 375 screens on the Toronto Transit Commission subway lines until Jan. 16. The artworks, part of a project dubbed “Life on the Line,” aim to bring awareness to themes related to mental health, communicating the struggle of mental illness through visuals when words cannot convey it.
“Unlike physical illnesses that can be measured and scanned, mental health disorders don’t have the same privilege, and that further stigmatizes those who suffer,” said Megan Kee, founder of Toronto creative agency TwentyTwenty Arts, which is behind the project.
“I think art has the potential to cut across boundaries and connect us with one another’s humanity.”
Prints of artworks featured in “Life on the Line” can be purchased through TwentyTwenty Arts, with 70 per cent of proceeds going toward the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Toronto Family Outreach and Response Program, which helps families and friends who have a loved one over age 16 experiencing a mental health issue.
Gillian Gray, the manager of the program, said demand for its services has increased about 10 per cent since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March.
“Our program is pretty unique in that we fill a big gap in the mental health system,” Gray said. “For most of the families we work with, their loved one isn’t actually getting any mental health care whatsoever.”
All 10 pieces in “Life on the Line” channel complex themes of mental illnesses and the path toward acceptance and healing. In “Empty,” a golden hand cradles the face of a sombre man. For Christy, the hand represents the hope she and others struggling with depression hold on to — a hope that she wants viewers struggling with their own mental health to feel by reminding them that they are not alone.
“There are many resources and people they can talk to,” Christy said. “We are all here to listen and empathize with one another.”
Another piece, titled “Agoraphobia” by Toronto artist Seri Stinson, channels the fear of going outside and the artist’s personal journey with this form of anxiety by turning nature and flowers — commonly viewed as serene and pleasant — into something disjointed and disturbing.
“Through COVID-19, (my anxiety disorder) has become a lot more heightened, to the point where I do feel an intense form of anxiety when I do need to go outside,” Stinson said.
While this is the second instalment of the “Life on the Line” project (the first was showcased at the end of 2018), this year has brought a host of unprecedented challenges for Kee, who questioned whether the project was possible this year.
But despite the TTC’s drop in ridership, Kee said there’s no better time to spark a public, widespread conversation about mental health, as the pandemic has led to widespread isolation and loneliness, and a reckoning with inequities faced by vulnerable populations in Toronto.
Loading…
Loading…Loading…Loading…Loading…Loading…
“I feel like several different social issues, including mental health, addiction and homelessness have reached a tipping point as a result of COVID,” Kee said. “We’ve seen worsening mental health, rise in the number of encampments and an unprecedented number of overdose deaths.”
The TTC itself also hit a grim record of its second-deadliest year in 2020, with 23 people dying by suicide on TTC property between January and November.
Nadine Yousif is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering mental health. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Follow her on Twitter: @nadineyousif_
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
