Nothing is further from who I am

Royal College of Art 2019

Antonia’s multi-screen installation Nothing is further from who I am  (2019) was born out of an interview with a mother who had suffered with post-natal depression and OCD. Many of the subjects we discussed could be seen as taboo; the interview is quite often uncomfortable to listen to. The installation is made up of a number of different elements: Liminal Space, a two-screen piece exploring the space created between mother and daughter through mental illness;Numbness, a durational video piece exploring the struggles and endurance often felt by mothers; Confessional, a verbatim re-enactment of an interview to retain anonymity but ensuring the same iterances; and a sculptural work based on the Celtic motherhood knot, burnt to a point where the wood is extremely fragile and under stress.


She has, as the writer C.C. O’Hanlon suggests, ‘tried to combine specific emotional and psychological contexts with intense curiosity about how the metaphors inherent in mental illness might be rendered visually… there is nothing palliative in [my] work, no misplaced optimism, no illusion of an end-point.’ [1]