Clare Lyons

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1311491 / (2014) I have bipolar disorder, and this work was made during my most extreme manic episode to date. Mania can be defined by certain specific factors such as: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, feeling more talkative than usual or feeling pressure to keep talking, intense racing thoughts, and psychomotor agitation - to name a few. For a creative person, it can feel like a great thing, you have a surge of ideas - all of them brilliant. The only problem is you have absolutely no idea what they are. Because of this, this process became almost entirely automatic, I literally just sat down in front of my webcam one day and started making these GIFs. While there felt like there was no apparent conceptualisation or rationalisation to the idea at the time, in retrospect I can see strong links between these fast moving images and the specific symptoms which define a manic episode. The high speed of the GIFs forces the viewer ever so slightly into the mindset of someone experiencing these symptoms, trying desperately to catch a glimpse of even one fast moving frame in an attempt to understand what's going on.