Risk Assessment

Below is the link to my Risk Assessment of my Living Gallery Piece

Link:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPuwQxS0EKdoeseu3UxisS2O0jV4ZgR_zmp6tW1AfVI/edit?usp=sharing

Evaluation

The performance went very well and we did not run into any technical issues besides the one I will discuss later on in this evaluation. I was able to complete my path during the sequence without any obstacles or need to alter my path in any way and the audience were still able to freely move through our piece on to the next and back, as well as viewing our piece more closely. I also felt that the fact that are piece looped flowed very well with the message that the piece was trying to communicate with its audience and I feel that there were points in the loops that it strongly resonated with both Louis and me. The recording of Louis' voice was playing from his phone which I held as I went around in my sequence. This actually worked EXTREMELY well as this resulted in the voice appearing far more personal than this omniscient voice that the speaker would have presented. This strengthened the audience's relatability to the piece and their understanding of the voice of Anxiety.

The main and only negative (which I feel turned out to become a positive) was that the speaker that we had initially planned to use to play Louis' voice stopped working and as a result on such short notice we were forced to use Louis' phone which I had to hold the whole time that I completed my sequence. I was initially irritated by this and felt that it reduced the quality of our piece and made it appear less refined and more rushed. However despite this the changes actually created a far more personal atmosphere within the piece as the voice felt more centred to the victim instead of everywhere around it. While taking all of this into account, I still felt that at times the recording was hard to hear during some of the loops due to the fact that Gloria's piece was fairly loud but this would not have been an issue if we had used the speaker.

I noticed that the majority of the audience were smiling or had a very "happy-curious" facial expression when they first began watching our piece. I couldn't clearly see their reactions or faces during the piece as I was moving in a circle, however by the end their faces gave of the appearance that they were in deep thought, either regarding what the piece was about or its message. A notable amount of the audience members even stayed to watch the piece a second or some even a third time. There was an audience member that stayed within our space watching us indefinitely, although I think that this was Louis' mom. I am confident that the majority of our audience grasped the piece's subject and its concept and I am confident that a smaller amount grasped the message of the piece and could even relate it to themselves easily.

I feel that the piece has further diversified and expanded my current knowledge on methods of performing and how different methods and mediums can be incorporated to together to not only enhance and strengthen the performance itself, but to better convey the message and themes of the performance to the actor and audience alike. This work has also given me more of an understanding regarding not only the mind and Anxiety in general, but also understanding those to elements within my own life and the role it plays in my own life as well as others. Funnily enough, despite the way we presented it, as a result of my research I have now come to the realization that Anxiety is not ENTIRELY negative as in actual a fact it helps to prepare us and aids us in anticipating not only possible danger or obstacles but things that are important to us in our lives such as a job interview.

Tate Modern Gallery History

When Tate first opened its doors to the public in 1897 it had just one site, displaying a small collection of British artworks. Today Tate has four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks. A number of new developments are planned for Tate Modern, Tate Britain  and Tate St Ives to ensure the galleries continue to expand.

Henry Tate

In 1889 Henry Tate, an industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, offered his collection of British art to the nation. There was no space for it in the National Gallery and the creation of a new gallery dedicated to British art was seen as a worthwhile aim and the search for a suitable site began. This gallery would house not only Henry Tate’s gift but also the works of British artists from various other collections. 

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
Ophelia 1851-2

The gallery at Millbank, London

In 1892 the site of a former prison, the Millbank Penitentiary, was chosen for the new National Gallery of British Art, which would be under the Directorship of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. The prison, used as the departure point for sending convicts to Australia, had been demolished in 1890.

Sidney R.J. Smith was chosen as the architect for the new gallery. His design is the core building that we see today, a grand porticoed entranceway and central dome which resembles a temple. The statue of Britannia with a lion and a unicorn on top of the pediment at the Millbank entrance emphasised its function as a gallery of British art. The gallery opened its doors to the public in 1897, displaying 245 works in eight rooms from British artists dating back to 1790.

Growth of the gallery

Since its original opening, the Millbank site has had seven major building extensions. In its first 15 years the Millbank site more than doubled in size, including the addition of seven rooms designed by the architect W.H. Romaine-Walker and funded by the arts and antique dealer J.J.(Sir Joseph) Duveen, built to display the Turner Bequest.

By 1917, the remit of the gallery changed. It was made responsible for the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art Romaine-Walker was again commissioned to design the new Modern Foreign Galleries, which were funded by Joseph Duveen’s son, Lord Duveen. These opened in 1926 and a year later a series of murals by Rex Whistler were unveiled in the restaurant.

Tate Gallery

In 1932, the gallery officially adopted the name Tate Gallery, by which it had popularly been known as since its opening. In 1937, the new Duveen Sculpture Galleries opened. Funded by Lord Duveen and designed by John Russell Pope, Romaine-Walker and Gilbert Jenkins, these two 300 feet long barrel-vaulted galleries were the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture. By this point, electric lighting had also been installed in all the rooms enabling the gallery to stay open until 5pm whatever the weather.

In 1955, Tate Gallery became wholly independent from the National Gallery and discussions began on an extension that would increase the its exhibition space. A major extension in the north-east corner, designed by Richard Llewelyn-Davies opened in 1979. In the same year, the gallery took over the adjacent disused military hospital, enabling the building of the new Clore Gallery, designed by Sir James Stirling and funded by the Clore Foundation. It opened in 1987 and went on to win a Royal Institute of British Architects award the following year.

The Tate Liverpool gallery building, on the Albert Dock

Tate Liverpool

In the 1980s Alan Bowness, then director of Tate, decided to create a ‘Tate of the North’, as the project became known. This would be a gallery with a distinct identity, dedicated to showing modern art and encouraging a new, younger audience through an active education programme.

A warehouse at the disused Albert Dock in Liverpool was chosen as the site for the new gallery. The dock, once a bustling site crammed with rich cargos from Asia, tea, silk, tobacco and spirits, was derelict. In 1981 the dockyard underwent a rejuvenation, with the Maritime Museum Leasing one of the warehouses and restaurants and bars opening.

In 1985, James Stirling was commissioned to design the new Tate Gallery at Liverpool. His designs left the exterior of the brick and stone building built over a colonnade of sturdy Doric columns almost untouched, but transformed the interior into an arrangement of simple, elegant galleries suitable for the display of modern art. It opened to the public in May 1988.

2008 marked the year Liverpool was named European Capital of Culture. To celebrate this, in 2007 the gallery hosted the Turner Prize, the first time the competition was held outside London. more than 600,000 visitors a year visit Tate Liverpool, cementing its position as a venue for major European exhibitions of modern art.

Tate St Ives

St Ives, a small Cornish town on the southwest coast of England, perhaps seems an unlikely site for a major art gallery. However, its artistic connections date back to Victorian times when numerous artists came to St Ives to paint, attracted by its special quality of light. Artists associated with the town include Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Alfred Wallis and Mark Rothko.

Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. By the middle of the decade it was decided a gallery should be built there to show works by artists who had lived or worked in St Ives, loaned from the collection.

In 1988, a building was chosen on the site of a former gasworks overlooking Porthmeor Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev were selected for designs that echoed the shapes of the former gasworks, including the rotunda that forms the heart of the gallery.

Building work began in 1991, funded by donations from the local community, the Henry Moore Foundation and the European Regional Development Fund. The Tate Gallery, St Ives opened in June 1993 and in just six months welcomed over 120,000 visitors – 50,000 more than the original target for the entire year. Since then, the gallery has been an outstanding success with an average of 240,000 visitors per year.

An exciting development is now planned for Tate St Ives, which will provide better exhibition and display spaces, new education areas and improved visitor facilities, allowing greater scope for understanding the heritage of the St Ives artists’ colony. 

Tate Modern

In December 1992 the Tate Trustees announced their intention to create a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art in London.

The former Bankside Power Station was selected as the new gallery site in 1994. The following year, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were appointed to convert the building into a gallery. That their proposal retained much of the original character of the building was a key factor in this decision.

The iconic power station, built in two phases between 1947 and 1963, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It consisted of a stunning turbine hall, 35 metres high and 152 metres long, with the boiler house alongside it and a single central chimney. However, apart from a remaining operational London Electricity sub-station the site had been redundant since 1981.

In 1996 the design plans were unveiled and, following a £12 million grant from the English Partnerships regeneration agency, the site was purchased and work began. The huge machinery was removed and the building was stripped back to its original steel structure and brickwork. The turbine hall became a dramatic entrance and display area and the boiler house became the galleries.

Since it opened in May 2000, more than 40 million people have visited Tate Modern. It is one of the UK’s top three tourist attractions and generates an estimated £100 million in economic benefits to London annually.

In 2009 Tate embarked on a major project to develop Tate Modern. Working again with Herzog & de Meuron, the transformed Tate Modern will make use of the power station’s spectacular redundant oil tanks, increase gallery space and provide much improved visitor facilities. 

Tate Modern lit up at night, 2000

Rehearsal 5

We have chosen what masks we will use and I am using this rehearsal to create the final draft of Louis' dialogue for his role as the voice that he will record. Louis spent the rehearsal learning it. I also began analyzing the hazards of our piece as this would be a crucial part of our risk assessment that I would create later on. This rehearsal was spent doing a lot of admin work for our piece as all of the performance element have been decided and executed, all that needed to happen was Louis learning and then performing his dialogue in  front of me so that we could both agree that his style of performance worked and he could go ahead and record it outside of rehearsal time. We did a few run throughs of our gallery sequence.

Rehearsal 4

This rehearsal has been used to discuss the relevance of using masks within our piece and we have decided that they would be used to make Louis' less relatable as a human character and more relatable as an entity, as the mask will be emotionless and will cover all of Louis' face. I will also wear a mask that will symbolize my connection to the entity of Anxiety, but will not cover my entire face but will only cover my eye area. I will go into further depth on the masks in a post dedicated to them. Louis' voice may have some editing to make it more ghostly or echoing, or we may just choose to leave it so its more raw. We will also incorporate a chair into our piece which will work as a starting and finishing point for the piece.

Rehearsal 3

We have decided that we would use masks as costumes but we are still yet to decide what kind of masks or what they'd represent or signify. We have both decided that a mirror would be our main experimental element and the focal point throughout the whole piece as a mirror would be the perfect literal and abstract method of control that Anxiety would use to control its victim. We are deciding if the mirror should be used in a way that it is in a fixed position or if it is somehow moving.

Rehearsal 2

During our second rehearsal we decided that we would incorporate sound into our performance and that we would use Louis' voice as a dialogue for the entity of Anxiety, but that it would be recorded and would be played back repeatedly. We also decided that there should be a focal point within the piece, an object or concept that allows the victim of Anxiety to be controlled by Anxiety. We are yet to decide on what sought of costumes that we want to use but despite this we still plan to incorporate them into the piece. I am currently drafting some dialogue for Louis' to learn and record. The dialogue is being created with influence from what actual people that suffer form severe Anxiety hear in their heads.

Rehearsal 1

Our first rehearsal mainly revolved around us focusing trying to use improv as a way to gain inspiration form our concept of anxiety and how it afflicts the mind. We had a break and then during the second half of our rehearsal we decided that our piece would focus on a character having a conversation or interaction with the anxiety itself or its "Voice". We decided that we want to make the performance naturalistic but incorporate other elements within it including costumes.

Audience Info

Audience Restriction and Controls

The space is fairly spacious and so as result allows the audience to move through it, easily viewing both my own and Gloria's gallery pieces and then being able to move through to Mason's gallery piece.  There is not really a need for some form of a directional prop like a rail or tape, especially since Mason's room has a sign on the door for all the audience to see. I will say that there is a small but slight chance that I could stop midway during my sequence if an audience member is is in my path. 

Ideal Audience Numbers

The ideal number of audience members that would be in the space at any given time would be a maximum of 15. Really 10 would be more appropriate, however the audience members would be continuously flowing through to Mason's gallery piece and then back through to view ours and Gloria's once more through the door. Although 15 members would be ideal to be within the space itself, those viewing our actual piece right in front of it would probably be best to be kept to a number  of 5-7. This would be to ensure that there are not too many audience members bunching up which could lead to injury and to ensure that my path is not blocked by any audience members.  

Research on Anxiety (Part 4)

What is anxiety?
When you are anxious you feel fearful and tense. In addition you may also have one or more unpleasant physical symptoms. These may be:

A fast heart rate.
The sensation of having a 'thumping heart' (palpitations).
Feeling sick (nausea).
Shaking (tremor).
Sweating.
Dry mouth.
Chest pain.
Headaches.
Fast breathing.
The physical symptoms are partly caused by the brain which sends lots of messages down nerves to various parts of the body when we are anxious. The nerve messages tend to make the heart, lungs and other parts of the body work faster. In addition, you release stress hormones (such as adrenaline) into the bloodstream when you are anxious. These can also act on the heart, muscles and other parts of the body to cause symptoms.

Anxiety is normal in stressful situations and can even be helpful. For example, most people will be anxious when threatened by an aggressive person. The burst of adrenaline and nerve impulses which we have in response to stressful situations can encourage a 'fight or flight' response. Some people are more prone to normal anxieties. For example, some people are more anxious than others before examinations. Anxiety is abnormal if it:

Is out of proportion to the stressful situation; or
Persists when a stressful situation has gone, or if the stress is minor; or
Appears for no apparent reason when there is no stressful situation.

What are anxiety disorders?

There are various conditions (disorders) where anxiety is a main symptom. This leaflet is about generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). See separate leaflets for other types of anxiety disorders (eg, social anxiety disorder, panic attack and panic disorder, phobias, acute stress reaction, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc).

What is generalised anxiety disorder (GAD)?

If you have GAD you have a lot of anxiety (feeling fearful, worried and tense) on most days. The condition persists long-term. Some of the physical symptoms of anxiety (detailed above) may come and go. Your anxiety tends to be about various stresses at home or work, often about quite minor things. Sometimes you do not know why you are anxious.

It can be difficult to tell the difference between normal mild anxiety in someone with an anxious personality and someone with GAD. As a rule, symptoms of GAD cause you distress and affect your day-to-day activities. In addition, you will usually have some of the following symptoms:

Feeling restless, on edge, irritable, muscle tension, or keyed up a lot of the time.

Tiring easily.

Difficulty concentrating and your mind going blank quite often.

Poor sleep (insomnia). Usually it is difficulty in getting off to sleep.

You do not have GAD if your anxiety is about one specific thing. For example, if your anxiety is usually caused by fear of one thing then you are more likely to have a phobia.

Who develops generalised anxiety disorder (GAD)?

GAD develops in about 1 in 50 people at some stage in life. Twice as many women as men are affected. It usually first develops in your 20s but is frequently being recognised in older people.

What causes generalised anxiety disorder (GAD)?

The cause is not clear. The condition often develops for no apparent reason. Various factors may play a part. For example:

Your genetic 'makeup' may be important (the material inherited from your parents which controls various aspects of your body). Some people have a tendency to have an anxious personality, which can run in families.

Childhood traumas such as abuse or death of a parent, may make you more prone to anxiety when you become older.

A major stress in life may trigger the condition. For example, a family crisis or a major civilian trauma such as a toxic chemical spill. But the symptoms then persist when any trigger has gone. Common minor stresses in life, which you may otherwise have easily coped with, may then keep the symptoms going once the condition has been triggered.

Some people who have other mental health problems such as depression or schizophrenia may also develop GAD.

Research on Anxiety (Part 3)

People with anxiety have an extraordinary ability to anticipate potential problems. This makes them great to be with – they are the ones with the plan B, the plan C, the spare batteries, the phone charger and the escape route. Being able to anticipate trouble can be a great strength, but like any strength, too much can cause a metaphorical headache.

When the anxiety becomes intense, it can lead to avoidance of experiences that would likely bring more joy than trouble. For people who don’t understand anxiety, or for those who cruise through their days with a more laid back connection with the world, it can seem as though this avoidance and other anxiety-driven behaviours are more a matter of ‘playing it safe’. Not so, says new research.

People with anxiety have something in common. Their brains have a unique wiring that is different to people who don’t have anxiety. This causes them to interpret things as harmful, even if they aren’t. The scientists call is ‘over generalisation’. Now to explain.

What is it about anxious brains?
We are all wired to notice and respond to threats in the environment. When we notice something potentially dangerous, our body gets us ready to fight the danger or run from it. This is something that happens in all of us, and it’s a healthy, normal thing to do. It’s one of the things that has kept us humans alive, so when it’s happening in the right dose, it’s a great thing.

For people with anxiety, this happens a little too much. An anxious brain is an overprotective brain. It does exactly what healthy, normal brains are meant to do, but more often. What this means is that people with anxiety tend to overgeneralise – their brains and their bodies respond to things as though they are dangerous or threatening, even when they aren’t.

A recent study explored whether or not this was due to the way people with anxiety perceive things in the environment.

The Research – What They Did
A group of people with anxiety were trained to associate three distinct tones with one of three outcomes: money loss, money gain or no consequence.

Next, participants were asked to listen to one of 15 tones and to indicate whether or not they had heard the tone in their earlier training. If they guessed correctly, they were rewarded with money.

The money was the incentive to discriminate between the tones. If the participants overgeneralised, and weren’t able to tell the difference between the tones, they would mistake tones they hadn’t heard for tones they had, and vice versa. This would mean no money.

What they Found
The study showed that people with anxiety were more likely to mistake a new tone for one they had heard earlier. They had a ‘perceptual inability to discriminate’, which means that they were less able to notice the differences between the sounds. They were more likely to associate a new, unheard tone with money loss or gain.

What it Means
We all own a custom made brain. This is a great thing. Guided by our experiences, our brains develop to be the best brain for our own individual circumstances and needs. Every experience we have changes our brain in some way. These changes will eventually influence future behaviour and experiences. This is referred to as the plasticity of the brain.The brain is plastic in that it is open to influence and change.

The brain’s plasticity (the ability of the brain to change according to experience) allows us to adapt and grow in response to our environment, but it can also lead to changes in the brain that are less helpful.

In people who have anxiety, emotional experiences cause changes in the brain that persist even after the emotional experience is over. These changes cause difficulties in being able to tell the difference between the original experience and subsequent experiences.

What this means is that people with anxiety will have a similar emotional response to new and unrelated or irrelevant situations, even when those situations would not typically warrant the same response.

These fundamental differences in people with anxiety cause them to perceive the world differently. Rather than assessing the potential harm of things in the environment, people with anxiety tend to overgeneralise and interpret everything as potentially harmful.

As part of the study, researchers used brain imaging to measure brain responses and found that there were noticeable differences in the brains of people with anxiety, and those without. The differences were found in the amygdala, the part of the brain that is responsible for the experience of intense emotion, such as fear and anxiety, and the perception of potential danger in the environment. It is also responsible for the changes that happen in the body as a result of the fight or flight response, the body’s natural response to potential threat or danger. Increased activity in the amygdala has been associated with panic attacks and anxiety.

The researchers stress that the flexibility of the brain that leads to anxiety isn’t ‘bad’.

‘Anxiety traits can be completely normal, and even beneficial evolutionarily. Yet an emotional event, even minor sometimes, can induce brain changes that might lead to full-blown anxiety.’ – Rony Paz, Researcher, Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

The avoidance that is often driven by anxiety is physiological and is not a choice. It’s not a question of won’t, it’s a question of can’t. If you love someone with anxiety, understanding this will hopefully help you understand those times of avoidance that don’t make sense. The ‘no’ isn’t to you, it’s to a situation or an experience that will trigger the feeling of being in danger.

For anyone with anxiety, or for anyone who loves someone with anxiety, it is also important to remember that brains can change. Anxious brains are strong brains – wilful, determined, cautious – and as much as brains can change in ways that aren’t helpful, they are also open to changing in ways that are. Mindfulness and exercise are two things that have consistently been shown to strengthen the brain against anxiety. This doesn’t mean that anxiety will completely go away. We all need a little bit of anxiety to predict danger and to keep us safe. It’s about bringing as close as possible to more manageable levels, but the more we can understand about the workings of the brain, the closer we get to understanding how to influence it in ways that will lead to a healthier, more enriched way of living.

Research on Anxiety (Part 2)

People with social anxiety disorder, who have an extreme fear of social objects or situations, seem primed to experience negative emotions in situations that would have no impact on others. For example, in social anxiety disorder, individuals may fear perfectly ordinary situations, even one as seemingly innocuous as eating in public. To qualify as having social anxiety disorder, these fears must be persistent and extreme, and the individual must suffer impairment in daily life while recognizing that the fears are unreasonable. At the heart of the disorder are people’s belief that they will embarrass or humiliate themselves. To investigate the role of learning in social anxiety disorder, National Institute of Mental Health neuroscientist Karina Blair and colleagues (2016) recently compared brain scans of individuals with and without the disorder in response to a series of slides programmed to lead to negative, positive, and neutral reactions.

The basic rationale behind the study was that people acquire their fears early in life, by observing the reactions of their caregivers to situations, particularly ones in which they are unsure of how to act. In social anxiety disorder, these reactions often involve new situations. Very young children can sense the fears of their caregivers quite readily, even before they understand language. Consider what happens when a mother brings her infant son to a new physician’s office. The infant can sense that the mother is anxious when she holds him especially tightly and even, perhaps, by sensing her more rapid breathing and beating of her heart. As children get older, they are capable of noticing more signs of how their parents are reacting to new situations and objects on top of what they’ve already learned over the years.  They can understand what their parents say to them but, just as importantly, become able to gauge their nonverbal reactions as well.

The NIMH team used an innovative experimental method to observe how people with social anxiety disorder would respond not directly to a phobia-producing (i.e. novel) stimulus, but to a person showing a fearful response to a novel object. In their experiment, participants saw animated slides in which a male or female adult showed one of four reactions to an object designed uniquely for the study (e.g. something looking like a caterpillar with a star instead of a head). The 4 reactions included fear, anger, no response, and laughter. For the experiment’s first phase, participants saw the objects paired with the face of the person looking at the object expressing one of those 4 reactions. In the second phase, participants saw the objects without the faces. If observational learning indeed took place, the participants would respond similarly to the objects alone without the faces being present. Since all of this was happening in an fMRI scanner, the researchers could compare the brain activation patterns in phase 1 with the patterns shown by the participants in phase 2.

It’s known that the amygdala, a subcortical structure located in the limbic system, is the part of the brain that becomes activated in fear-related situations, including those in which other people display fear. As stated by the authors, “the amygdala is critical for learning the valence of novel objects from the emotional expressions of others”. Therefore, Blair and her team investigated the response of the amygdala, comparing people with social anxiety disorder and their age-matched controls. Another relevant brain region is in a part of the cortex involved in processing information relevant to the self. When you decide, for example, that something involves you- whether it be a threatening situation or just a social interaction in general- this part of your brain becomes engaged as well.

Participants weren’t aware of the study’s focus, as their task was to indicate, in phase 1, whether the face they were viewing was male or female. In phase 2, participants indicated whether they wanted to approach or wanted to avoid the novel object. Again, none of the participants knew the actual purpose of the experiment.

The findings revealed that, as hypothesized, the participants with social anxiety disorder showed increased activation of the amygdala in phase 2 when the objects had been associated, during phase 1, with fear. They also showed a slight, not non-significant, tendency to wish to avoid the object associated with fear compared to their non-socially anxious matched controls. Furthermore, there was a positive association between the severity of their social anxiety disorder symptoms and their amygdala’s activation in the presence of the conditioned-fear objects.

Research on Anxiety

1. Acts of kindness can help reduce social anxiety

Performing acts of kindness can help people with social anxiety mingle with others more easily.

People recruited into the study were put into one of three groups for four weeks:

• One group performed acts of kindness, like doing their roommates’ dishes.
• Another group were exposed to various social interactions without the acts of kindness.
• A third group, who did nothing special, acted as a control.

At the end of the study it was those who’d performed the acts of kindness who felt more comfortable in social interactions.

2. Three dietary supplements which reduce anxiety

Dietary supplements which contain passionflower, kava or combinations of L-lysine and L-arginine can help reduce anxiety, according to a review published in the Nutrition Journal.

The supplements generally had mild to moderate effects without producing any serious side-effects.

3. Why anxiety can be socially isolating

Anxiety interferes with the ability to take other people’s perspective, new research reveals.

Anxiety makes people focus more on themselves and reduces their empathy for others, psychologists have found.

The study’s results may help explain why anxiety can be such an isolating emotion.

4. You can inherit anxiety from your parents

An over-active network of brain areas is central to how children inherit anxiety and depression from their parents.

The network consists of three regions in the brain which work together to control the fear-response.

The study found that around 35% of the difference in anxiety was explained by family history.

5. Sedentary behaviour linked to anxiety

Sitting down all day has been linked to increased anxiety, a new study finds.

Low energy activities like watching TV, working at a computer or playing electronic games may all be linked to anxiety.

The cause of the link could be down to disturbed sleep, poor metabolic health or social withdrawal.

Experimental Elements (Part 4)

Another experimental element we will be using is a recording of Louis' dialogue which will be played out during the sequence and reacted to in time. We have chosen to do this in order to further remove relatability and elements of humanity form Louis' character. Hearing his voice in a recorded format will further fortify the image an d perception of Louis' character as nothing more than a literal representation/interpretation of a voice or almost a "Ghost".

My Gallery Piece Structure

The piece will begin with me sitting in a chair and Louis, facing me, will be kneeling. A recording of Louis' voice will begin asking me "Where is the Mirror?" This will cause me to stand up and begin walking in a circular fashion, all the while looking into the mirror, while the recording of Louis' voice begins criticizing my appearance, clothing choices, and my behaviour. I will react to all of these critiques while still moving in a circle towards the chair that I began in. Louis' voice will then hurl a final critique at me which will result ion me sitting back into my chair in the same state that I began in (both visually and emotionally). The structure of this piece strongly communicates my concept of "The Curse of Anxiety".

Experimental Elements (Part 3)

The third experimental element that we will be incorporating is a third mask which will also be white but will only be an eye mask and will not encompass the entire face as the mask Louis will be wearing. I will be wearing this mask and will be portraying the victim of the voice of Anxiety. We chose this mask as it allows the audience to see the majority of the face of the victim which allows them to relate and even resonate with the victim's emotions which will able to be presented and conveyed clearly. The mask itself is a representation of a sort of "Mark" of Anxiety that the voice has left on the victim due to its abuse. The mask only covers a small portion of the face signifying that the victim still retains much of his humanity but is still under the influence and affliction of the voice.

Experiential Elements (Part 2)

The second Experimental element that we have incorporated into our gallery piece is a full-face theatre mask with a blank and emotionless expression. Louis will wear this mask as he will be portraying the voice itself. The reason this mask was chosen is so that the audience will have difficulty relating with the voice and will view Louis as almost alien in nature. The mask helps to remove elements of humanity and relatability to Louis so as they will see it for what it it is, not a character but a literal representation of the voice of Anxiety within the mind. 

Experimental Elements

We have decided to use a mirror as one of our main experimental elements of our gallery. I feel that the mirror hold a strong representation of the stimulus of  what the victim's voice of Anxiety uses to afflict the victim. The mirror represents the voice of Anxiety's power over its the victim and how it uses an object or concept to channel the victims anxiety through to the victim.

My Gallery Piece

Louis and I have come up with the idea to have one of us represent the voice of the mind/person that is being afflicted with anxiety itself and the other playing the person that is being afflicted. The fact that our gallery piece has to be loopable actually makes it better as we want to strongly communicate and convey the concept of what I call "The Curse of Anxiety" in which I feel that Anxiety "traps" its victim in a cycle in which they are forever trying to change themselves due to the voice of anxiety within their minds however despite all the changes they make the end up in the same position as in which they started due to the fact that the voice can never be satisfied.

My Art Piece Inspiration (Part 2)

I have unfortunately lost my photo of the piece's plaque and have forgotten the name of the artist which is annoying! However I have chosen this art piece due to the fact that I feel that it represents a very interesting aspect of mental health , which is "Anxiety". Anxiety is a well-known and common issue that I believe ALL people suffer from, its just some people's are more intense and possesses a stronger effect than others. There are several different effects of Anxiety, however the one that I feel that this piece captures is the effect that Anxiety has on how one views themselves and the actions that they take due to those views. My personal view of the piece is that it represents a mind with Anxiety as it starts formless and without a shape and as the anxiety afflicts it, it tries to change and remold itself till the end where it is unrecognizable to even itself. I plan to have my and Louis' piece reflect and emulate that concept.

My Art Piece Inspiration