This painting exists as a partner to my work ‘Numb to Touch’. In this work the airy space of ‘Numb to Touch’ has been replaced by a heavy body of water filled with blooming algae. The figure is no longer floating weightlessly, but tenuously held between the water’s upward buoyant force and the downwards gravitational force of the earth which both act upon her. Balanced somewhere between the open air and the heavy depths of the watery world beneath her.

I began this work after noticing a patina had emerged on one of my copper panels which I had left in the open, after applying a single thin layer of oil, for three months. The patterns of this patina reminded me of organic shapes floating under the water. A swirling blue green algae, which I just needed to enhance. A happy accident.

I had been thinking at the time of Ophelia, her manifestation in Hamlet and her representation in that Pre-Raphaelite painting by John Everett Millais. I had painted ‘Numb to Touch’ as a kind of performance imagining myself as Ophelia to empower her as the artist depicting her own representation. Rather than being depicted from a male gaze as a tragic exotic figure of female youth and beauty. I wanted to explore her psychology from a point of empathy through my own experience with depression and anxiety. So that she is no longer a victim but a complex person navigating her world like any other human. When I saw the patina on this copper panel I realised that there was an opportunity to make this companion to ‘Numb to Touch’.

These patterns reminded me of the swirling thoughts that run into each other when left on our own. They are the only thing that keep my painted figure company within this in between place, however, they themselves are toxic just like this algae. She is held at the surface of the picture plane by the buoyancy of the water, and it speaks of the delicate intellectual and emotional balance that needs to be struck to avoid sinking. Not literally sinking as there is no actual water, this is a painting, but metaphorically into your own mind. The hand, which in ‘Numb to Touch’ lay flush against the surface of the picture plain, reminding us of this painted surface, has been pulled away as the body sinks into an illusion of space within the painting. Just as Ophelia's own representation becomes murky in her mythology. So the question is does this painting occur before 'Numb to Touch' or after? If this painting occurs just before ‘Numb to Touch’, it marks the beginning of her emerging from this body of water. We decide the order and so we create the narrative. My intention was to bring her to the surface and my warning is what happens when we don’t? When we continue to mythologise mental health and replace understanding and empathy with the exotic. It's our choice where to place her.