Fine art by Teigan, Costessey (2026)

06/04/2026

3rd year part 1.
I had my dissertation at the same time so I decided to do my practical on the same theme, catharsis through creation. Catharsis is the release of emotion, making and viewing artwork can be a cathartic experience.

I was really struggling in this period of time emotionally, I felt quite numb and couldn’t feel the urgency of my project deadlines which is something I always relied on to get me through. I really couldn’t get started, so I drew a picture of me crying. My lecturer made me print it A0 to increase its impact, but I found it also made me feel quite vulnerable being so easily seen in distress. I did some photography experimentation linked with my frustration with time blindness which you can see with the sandtimers.

I haven’t shared my actual final piece but it was a video piece where I spent hours watching and editing childhood footage, it was the only thing that brought me joy and happiness at the time. I added some nostalgic songs linked to my childhood and a voice over (that was fun learning how to edit sound waves so you can hear the voice over and music at the same time 🙃) but it’s far too personal to share so I’ve added some of my favourite sections from while I was still editing.

17/02/2026

Been a while 👋🏻 dumped the problem.

This was a piece I did in my 2nd year of uni where we made work for a specific location. My group chose The Blue Room at The Lawn in Lincoln which was previously the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum. I found some creepy almost haunted looking photos of the patients that resided in the Asylum. We also found record books with details of why the patients were admitted here.

A word that cropped up a lot was melancholia and mania which didn’t particularly refer to any specific diagnosis. It could have meant a person was grieving, out spoken, overexcited, even viewed as lazy due to societal expectations at the time. I wondered whether we had come as far with woman’s mental health as we thought?

If woman were thrown into asylums for disobeying their husbands, wanting an education and speaking their minds then thank goodness I was born in the present day! I reflected on my experiences with mental health, particularly on the build up to my ADHD diagnosis. I had cried out for help many times and my mum had raised her concerns about me to the GP over the course of my life, and what did they do? Shoved a few antidepressants in my hand that made me feel like a robot without addressing the real issue.

In my final piece I chose a patient called Lillian Neale who was 20 years old, as was I at the time of the project. She was admitted by her father with mania. Funnily enough she was a music teacher, unknown to me, I would become an art teacher 2 years later. I Connecting the past to present I show the contrast in treatment of woman’s mental health, but yet it is still so deeply misunderstood and misdiagnosed.
I purposefully did an unfinished painting inspired by illustrations in Alexander Morison’s, Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, 1840, where detail was focused on the face and other details were left at line work as he believed he could diagnose mental illnesses through facial expressions. By leaving my piece unfinished it felt rebellious as works of art usually show a completed master piece, but to me it was complete, I had captured the expressive core of the painting, the rest is up to the viewer.

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