Gilian Heard

Illustration

Artist statement

My works for this show were inspired by my fascination with mental health and psychology. I like to invent characters, relationships, and situations to illustrate the barriers between the world and neurodivergent people’s experience of it. I am aided by my own not un-chaotic experience with severe anxiety and depression, having recently blown past the one-year anniversary of taking treatment for it. I’ve been around mental disability and disorders my whole life between family and friends, and I wanted to apply that to exploring the relationship between chemistry, biology, and subjective experience.  

SSRI refers to a class of drugs designed to be an alternative to drugs like Xanax and older tricyclic anti-depressants, which act on the central nervous system to treat the symptoms of mental illness. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and acts by mimicking a compound in the brain of healthy people which stops serotonin from being reabsorbed too quickly before it can be used. To not be too obtuse with it, it plugs up the brain to keep all the good stuff inside. This leads to things like having memories, dreams, and energy for the first time.