Coming art exhibit to explore mental health

AN ART collective providing people with lived experience of mental health a safe space to express themselves and their experiences is preparing to host its first exhibition.

Launched in February by local resident Clare Johnston, Antifragile runs weekly workshops out of Norlane Community Centre, but its reach has quickly expanded online, connecting geographically separated individuals empowered by the group’s mission.

“[People with mental health struggles] tend to have less agency over how our worlds look, so Antifragile, from beginning to end, is designed so we have control,” Ms Johnston said.

“It’s our program; it’s our group, which has been quite a powerful thing and has enabled a lot of openness and camaraderie and genuine peer support to happen.

“It’s a hard thing to feel included when your brain doesn’t necessarily play the same way as everybody else’s and we’re hoping to make this as…user friendly as possible for the people that need it and trying to break down as many barriers as we feasibly can.”

Antifragile’s first exhibition will take place at Norlane Community Centre on October 5 and 6 before it shifts to the Creative Geelong precinct on Little Malop Street between October 7 and November 10.

The group will continue accepting art submissions from the exhibition from the broader community until September 6.

Ms Johnston said the aim of the upcoming show is to give Antifragile’s members and supporters the “validation of being included in the artistic community” and to show what people living with mental health conditions “actually experience”.

“Not how we’re described, but what those symptoms actually feel like,” she said.

The hope is these works, which Johnston warned may be confronted for some, help to challenge stigma surrounding mental health, particularly ideas around the perceived fragility of mental health battlers, and spark new conversations in the wider community.

“Things breaking and needing to be put back together isn’t necessarily a sign of their fragility. It’s actually a sign of resilience, of being able to get up again and again and again.

“Something every single one of us is extremely practiced in is falling to the absolute bottom and climbing back up and putting ourselves back together.

“We are not fragile. We are ridiculously resilient if we’re given the space and the support to do so.

“We’re antifragile.”

For more information, email [email protected] or phone the Norlane Community Centre on 5275 8124.