DSM-5

Series: Not a Codeable Disorder

Encaustic on panel, 2013

With the release of version 5 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, arrives a plethora of questions about the structures we rely on to quantify and qualify our understanding of mental illness. Controversy has always surrounded this psychiatric tome because of its power to label aberrant behaviour in society as psychiatric abnormalities and thus as potentially clinically treatable. That social values are constantly shifting makes any such stance narrow and culturally specific, at best, and, at its worst, destructive to individuals.

The series, Not a Codeable Disorder, 2013, looks at the newly formulated text between the DSM IV and DSM-5. Using fragments of the revised definitions of such disorders as Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Euphoria, I seek out the human spaces within the changing clinical definitions.

The technical process of incising and extracting text is like an excavation. The lettering is pulled out of a casement of layers of paint, one by one, to reveal the definitions in different typefaces at differing depth in the surface of the painting. Each font and colour is chosen for its historical and social connotations. The lettering has a cultural association. The colours are pulled from the domesticity of the ubiquitous paint swatch. The sometimes chaotic combination of all these elements is meant to evoke a contrast between recognizable elements of form and the purposeful obfuscation of language. The layers of heavy encaustic paint reference the layered complexity of the human mind and our attempts to codify it. The pieces themselves layer by nesting within each other.

Natalie Majaba Waldburger

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