Blue Blanket
Cyanotype on cotton
2024
What does a psychiatric diagnosis do? It can be a tool that organizes, explains, and comforts—but it also obscures, fragments, and omits. Blue Blanket reflects this tension, exploring diagnosis as a patchwork—something pieced together to provide coherence but ultimately insufficient in warmth and tenderness.
Fabrication
The quilt is constructed through a series of abstractions. Cyanotypes on fabric form its panels, each an impression of the objects used to create them: body parts, pills, dead leaves, trash, smoke, handwriting, and brushstrokes. These shadowy, incomplete impressions echo the way diagnostic criteria reduce the complexity of lived experiences into observable behaviors. The process of cutting, arranging, and stitching these fragments mirrors the act of creating a diagnosis—a piecemeal framework that imposes order on the chaotic depth of human experience.
The cyanotype process required experimentation, trial and error. Oversaturation of emulsion caused chemical imbalances. The fabric became hyper-sensitive, so reactive to light that any exposure rendered it completely saturated. Only faint impressions were captured, or none at all. In some cases the original objects disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a faint suggestion or no trace at all.
Some panels were cut, some ripped, and some left raw. Stitched together mostly by the methodical, predictable sewing machine with hand stitching and embroidery entering in the latter stages. Machine and subject both contributing to the piecing together. The result is a patchwork of impressions that reflects as much about its creator as it does about the subject it seeks to represent.
Form
What begins as an orderly grid at the top cascades into an ever more threadbare cacophony of patchwork below. The quilt moves away from the traditional form of a blanket, its panels becoming looser, overlapping, and less structured. It is hastily strewn together and intentionally incomplete–a quilt top without batting or backing, lacking the layers that provide warmth, durability, and comfort. Hung vertically in an open space, it invites subjects to circumnavigate and inspect its front, back, and inner layers. It thus floats between subjects, their bodies casting shadows on the thin material, obscuring their form to viewers on the other side.
Making Diagnoses
The medical model is a siren, luring us into the pacifying embrace of physicalism. If it is something we have labeled, then it is something we have seen before and understand. Chaos seems within reach of our control. But without definitive physical markers of madness, the medical model leans on constructs that masquerade as naturalistic, indifferent kinds, reducing complex lived realities to surface-level symptoms (Harpin,2018, p.2). Despite genuine efforts, these observations are not immune to bias. Throughout its history, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has described symptoms and disorders in ways that reflect the values of the time. In the past, we’ve seen the pathologizing of homosexuality and political dissent (American Psychiatric Association, 1952, p38-39; Metzl, 1964 p. 100). Today, we see language that revolves around productivity and efficiency and places the root of disorder within the individual (Cohen, 2016, p80).
The way symptoms are written and organized into categories aims for objectivity but is ultimately a subjective process. Diagnoses are arrived at via a consensus among experts. Panels may not be representative of the people they aim to treat and the individuals on them are not immune to bias and corruption (Harpin, 2018, p.4). Just as I got to decide which objects were worth photographing, how to manipulate those images, and how to piece them together; these experts determined which behaviors were deemed worthy of classification.
Identity and Diagnosis
There are countless ways to stitch together the fragments of a life. How we organize and obscure these experiences shapes the stories we tell about ourselves and the identities we internalize. In this way, diagnosis identifies and orients. Receiving a diagnosis can be a relief, offering validation and a framework for understanding one’s struggles. It can imbue a sense of order amid chaos. But with the comfort of its simplicity, we can sometimes leave parts of ourselves behind, or stuff them into the scrap fabric bag we’ve been accruing over the years.
Blue Blanket invites viewers to reflect on these contradictions: the clarity and fragmentation, the comfort and omission, and the order and erasure inherent in psychiatric diagnosis. It is a meditation on the spaces between care and control, understanding and reduction—on what is gained and what is lost in the act of stitching together a life.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (1952). Sexual deviation. In Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (1st ed., p.38-39). American Psychiatric Association.
Cohen, B.M.Z., (2016). Psychiatric hegemony (pp.69-96). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6
Hacking, I., (1999). Madness: Biological or constructed? In The social construction of what? (p.100-114). Harvard University Press.
Harpin, A., (2018). Madness, art, and society: Beyond illness. (pp.1-14). Routledge.
Metzl, J. (2009). The protest psychosis : how schizophrenia became a black disease. Beacon Press.