Filmmaker Statement

Put simply, my artistic practice is rooted in my struggle with clinical depression and suicidal ideation. This struggle is what drove me to create and creating is what kept me alive. This experience, thus, fuels my passion for and belief in the arts, and underpins my artistic practice at the level of content and form. At these two levels, then, WAVE FORM branches out from my previous work as a filmmaker and writer. In terms of content, WAVE FORM is a new approach to my previous work to bear witness to, and delve deeply into, the complexities of a life lived with mental illness. In terms of form, WAVE FORM, like my previous work, is guided by the belief that explorations of experiences of mental illness require an experimental impulse—bending convention, hybridizing forms, multiplying perspectives, and so on, as a means of finding new ways to articulate an experience that is seemingly inexpressible and, thus, mis-represented, stigmatized, and willfully misunderstood.