About Beauty and Terror

 Panic attacks involve an intense wave of uneasiness, fear or even terror which is characterised by its unexpectedness and debilitating intensity. Symptoms can be different for different people, but includes a pounding heart (to the degree that the sufferer feels they are having a heart attack), a sense of not being able to breathe, a sense of paralysis, uncontrollable trembling, a feeling of unreality or detachment, and a very strong sense that the attack will never end. The sufferer may be consumed by irrational thoughts, unable to tell the difference between these thoughts and reality.

I interviewed a number of people who have experienced panic, whose mental symptoms included the feeling that your mind is trapped in a fog with no connection to reality. In a similar vein, physical symptoms can include a deep sense of paralysis, as if the world has slowed to a stop and escape is impossible.

During panic, ones sense of sight may be sharp, bordering on crystalline, with a heightened perception of colour and form. This visual input from the outside world enters the body and sets up a stark contrast to the foggy, dissociated, paralysis which one may feel. The sum of the experience is well captured in Rilke’s line “Beauty and Terror”.  

Conversations around mental health have come to the fore in the past two years, and panic attacks are perhaps more frequent or at least more frequently acknowledged. However, it can be very difficult for someone who suffers from mental health issues such as anxiety to explain this to someone who has not experienced it, even if the sufferer feels ready to share. Even for the most eloquent speaker, the experience can defy description. Inspired by bright colour and photography which conveys a sense of unreality or otherworldliness, I chose a to pursue a series of abstracted self portraits. The work explores this confounding contrast between the terror of how panic feels, and the beauty which may be perceived during those feelings of terror. In the work, which was shot entirely in the sea, the water itself becomes a metaphor for panic, being both beautiful and terrifying. The water offers further metaphors, the turmoil of particulate matter and multitudes of bubbles representing a loss of perspective, the surface of the water acting as a physical barrier between the experience of panic and the “real world”, and floating (or drowning) representing dissociation or “groundlessness”.

As red was identified by interviewees as a key colour associated with panic, red, with bright white highlights was selected to trigger an immediate response in the viewer. Some images convey a sense of calm, others, turmoil, which resonates with the ebbing and flowing experience of panic, and echoes the sensation of the breath. As the experience of panic, once triggered, is non-linear, the work is presented so that the viewer is able to engage with the work without a sense of beginning or end.

My intention was to produce work which would make the viewer ask “is panic really like this?” and come to the conclusion: “yes, it really is like this”.

It is an endless moment of beauty and terror.