My mad visions

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the phenomenological and existential process of artmaking and how it helps me. I do this by seeing how art builds a technique of the self and a system and culture of care, bringing about a ‘“Madpeople’s” coping mechanism’. I present live excerpts from my hallucinations, expressed and narrated in images and words. I describe and assess the process of turning the subjective experience of a hallucination into an objective thing in the artworks I make, showing how this changes the experiences which are expressed, allowing me to cope with and even celebrate them. I am no longer the ‘sick schizo’, I am creative and whole. I then turn to French philosophers Bernard Stiegler and Michel Foucault, whose ideas are grounded in Nietzsche, to evaluate what happens during the transformative effect that art making has on my hallucinatory experiences.