The Addiction Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan: Exploring Euphoria, Escape and the Chains Within
Updated: Aug 31
Addiction Sculpture by Julia O'Sullivan
The Addiction Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan explores the hidden emotional landscape behind addiction, revealing the struggle between escape, euphoria and the desire for freedom. Inspired by personal experience and deep reflection, this powerful artwork gives a voice to the invisible battles many people face.
Through hypnotic eyes, gripping claws, heavy chains and an endless search for light, the sculpture explores addiction as more than a behaviour — it reveals the pain, vulnerability and humanity behind the person trapped within the cycle.
Chapter 2: The Promise of Euphoria
Chapter 4: Chained to Addicition
Chapter 5:How Close Are We to the Edge?
Chapter 1 – Finding the Voice of Addiction
Some subjects are researched.
Others are felt.
The Addiction Head came from both.
Addiction is a subject that has touched my life personally. My father struggled with alcohol, and his drinking contributed to the dementia that affected his later years.
So when I began creating this Head, I wasn't approaching addiction as something completely unfamiliar.
I had seen some of what it could leave behind.
But seeing the consequences of addiction is not the same as understanding the person caught within it.
And that distinction became important to me.
Beyond the Judgement
Addiction is so easily judged from the outside.
Why don't they just stop?
Why would they do that to themselves?
Can't they see what it's doing?
But the more I thought about addiction, the less interested I became in the question:
Why don't you stop?
I wanted to understand another question.
What keeps drawing you back?
There isn't one answer.
People become dependent upon substances and behaviours for different reasons, and I didn't want this sculpture to pretend otherwise.
But something that interested me enormously was the promise of relief.
The possibility, however temporary, of changing how you feel.
Quietening something.
Escaping something.
Feeling something.
Or perhaps, for a while, feeling nothing at all.
That was something I could understand.
Just This Once
As I worked on the sculpture, I found myself looking inward as well as outward.
I understand the temptation to want difficult thoughts and feelings to become quieter.
That small voice that whispers:
Just this once.
What harm can it do?
You deserve a break.
It doesn't necessarily sound threatening.
Quite the opposite.
It can sound comforting.
It promises that, just for a little while, things might feel easier.
And then comes the other side.
The morning after.
The regret.
The exhaustion.
The consequences.
The collecting of the pieces.
And sometimes, eventually, the voice returns.
Just this once.
That contradiction fascinated me.
The very thing that appears to offer an escape can eventually become another thing from which someone needs to escape.
My Father's Story — And Mine
My father's relationship with alcohol is one I will never completely understand.
I know what I saw from my position as his daughter.
I know some of the consequences.
But I cannot claim to know everything that drove him towards it.
That story belonged to him.
Creating this Head also made me recognise things within myself — my own relationship with pain, coping and survival — but that is a much larger story, and one I intend to explore properly through my future work on trauma.
For this sculpture, I wanted to stay with addiction itself.
Not to excuse it.
Not to condemn it.
But to look at the battle taking place between two incredibly powerful desires:
the desire for relief
and
the desire to be free.
That became the foundation of the Addiction Head.
And at the centre of it all, I placed one word:
Euphoria.
Because before I could show the prison, I needed to understand the promise.
Chapter 2 – The Promise of Euphoria
At the end of Chapter One, I used one word.
Euphoria.
It sits at the centre of the Addiction Head for a reason.
Because when we talk about addiction, we naturally talk about what it destroys.
The relationships.
The health.
The money.
The opportunities.
The trust.
The person themselves.
Those consequences are real.
But while creating this sculpture, I realised that if I only represented the destruction, I would be showing just one side of the story.
There had to be something drawing the person towards it in the first place.
Something seductive enough to make the danger worth approaching.
Something powerful enough to make that little voice say:
Again.
The Seduction
I didn't want addiction to enter this sculpture looking like a monster.
Not yet.
Because monsters are easy to avoid.
Addiction can offer something far more tempting.
Pleasure.
Relief.
Excitement.
Numbness.
Confidence.
Escape.
A change in how the world feels, even if only temporarily.
And that is where I began thinking about euphoria.
Not because every addiction creates the same sensation, or because everyone is searching for exactly the same thing.
They aren't.
But because I needed one word to represent the promise.
The thing waiting on the other side.
Come here.
This will make you feel better.
Just for a while.
There is something incredibly seductive about that promise when whatever you are experiencing without it feels harder to bear.
The Hypnotic Pull
That idea began influencing the visual language of the Head.
I introduced hypnotic eyes and distorted patterns because I wanted the surface to contain a sense of attraction and disorientation.
Something drawing you in.
Something almost mesmerising.
I wanted the viewer to feel that pull rather than simply stand outside the sculpture and judge it.
Because from the outside, we can see consequences very clearly.
The person caught within addiction may see them too.
But knowing something is harmful doesn't automatically remove the desire for what it provides.
That contradiction interested me enormously.
Knowing and wanting can exist at the same time.
So can pleasure and regret.
Relief and consequence.
Desire and fear.
Perhaps that is part of what makes addiction so difficult for those of us standing outside it to understand.
We see the damage and think the answer should therefore be obvious.
But the sculpture asks us to look at the other side too.
What if the thing hurting you is also the thing you believe will make you feel better?
The Morning After
Of course, euphoria doesn't last.
That is the deception.
The moment passes.
Reality returns.
And whatever was waiting before may still be there afterwards.
Sometimes accompanied by something new.
Regret.
Shame.
Physical consequences.
Damage that needs repairing.
Promises made to yourself.
Never again.
And yet the memory of relief remains.
The mind remembers the escape.
The voice can return.
Just this once.
And the cycle has somewhere to begin again.
That was the contradiction I wanted at the centre of the Addiction Head.
Euphoria is the promise.
But it is not the whole story.
Because as I developed the sculpture, the thing that initially appeared to offer freedom began to change.
The attraction needed to become possession.
The comfort needed to become confinement.
The thing being reached for needed to start reaching back.
And that is when the claws appeared.
Chapter 3 – When The Addiction Takes Hold
The Addiction Head begins with attraction.
Euphoria.
Hypnotic eyes.
The promise of escape.
But that is only the beginning of the story.
As the viewer moves around the sculpture, that promise becomes increasingly difficult to separate from something much darker.
Because eventually the thing being reached for begins to reach back.
The Claws — The Grip of Addiction
Layers of claws surround the face.
I wanted them to feel as though addiction itself had become a physical entity.
Something with a grip.
Something capable of holding on.
The relationship has changed.
What may once have offered comfort, pleasure or relief is no longer simply something the person reaches towards.
Now it is holding them.
That distinction was important to me.
The claws are not there to represent weakness.
Quite the opposite.
Look at the size of what this person is fighting.
Look at how tightly it has attached itself.
Look at what they are trying to escape from.
I wanted the viewer to see the struggle rather than simply judge the person caught within it.
The Spikes — The Cost Beneath the Relief
Then there are the spikes piercing the Head.
The promise was relief.
The reality can also contain pain.
Physical.
Emotional.
Consequential.
The spikes allowed me to put that contradiction directly onto the sculpture.
Something can provide temporary pleasure while simultaneously causing harm.
Those two realities can exist together.
That is part of what makes the cycle so cruel.
The thing that temporarily makes something easier can eventually make life considerably harder.
And yet the memory of what it once provided can remain.
The Chains — No Longer Free
The chains take the idea of entrapment even further.
They physically connect the Head to the wooden plinth beneath it.
By this point, the promise of freedom has become its opposite.
The person is anchored.
I didn't want the chains merely hanging decoratively from the sculpture.
They needed to go somewhere.
They needed to attach.
Because addiction doesn't simply hover around the edges of someone's life.
It can become tied into its foundations.
And the chains lead us directly towards that foundation.
But before we follow them all the way down into the plinth, there is another place we need to look.
Inside the Head.
Searching for the Light
Inside is a completely different world.
There is light.
A destination.
Something that appears reachable.
Something worth moving towards.
But between the person and that light are endless stairways.
I created a shadow of the person wandering through them.
Searching.
Climbing.
Trying another route.
And another.
And another.
But never quite arriving.
For me, this became one of the most important parts of the entire sculpture.
Because the person hasn't disappeared.
They are still searching.
They are still trying to find a route towards something beyond the cycle.
But the journey is exhausting.
A staircase appears to offer progress.
You climb.
You move.
Surely you must be getting somewhere.
And yet somehow you find yourself back within the same maze.
Another route.
Another attempt.
Another promise that perhaps this time you will reach the light.
Still There
I deliberately kept the light visible.
I could have made the interior completely dark.
But that wasn't what I wanted to say.
The darkness isn't the person.
The claws aren't the person.
The chains aren't the person.
The addiction isn't the person.
Somewhere inside all of it is still someone searching.
Someone trying to navigate those endless paths.
Someone who may be exhausted by repeatedly finding themselves in the same place.
But the light remains.
And so does the person looking for it.
Outside the Head, however, those chains are still pulling downwards.
They lead somewhere very deliberately.
Into a landscape I built from different woods, different heights and different addictions.
Because the story doesn't finish with what addiction does inside the mind.
It continues into the foundations beneath it.
Chapter 4 – Chained to Addiction
The chains surrounding the Addiction Head don't simply hang from the sculpture.
They go somewhere.
I wanted the viewer to be able to physically follow them down from the Head into the wooden plinth beneath it.
Because the plinth was never designed simply to support the sculpture.
It is part of the addiction.
A Landscape of Addictions
I constructed the base from many individual blocks of different woods.
They are different colours.
Different grains.
Different heights.
Nothing is uniform.
Together they create an uneven wooden landscape beneath the Head.
Into those blocks, I carved words.
Alcohol.
Drugs.
Anorexia.
And other forms of addiction.
I wanted the base to broaden the narrative beyond the addictions we immediately recognise.
Because addiction doesn't necessarily arrive in one form.
It can attach itself to different substances and behaviours.
It can look different from one person to another.
So I didn't want one block.
I wanted many.
Each standing separately.
Each carrying its own name.
Each potentially becoming something to which a person can be bound.
Follow the Chains
Then I anchored the chains from the Head directly into those wooden blocks.
That physical connection was important.
The Head isn't hovering symbolically above addiction.
It is chained to it.
You can follow the chain with your eyes.
From the person.
Down through the sculpture.
Until you reach the thing holding them.
There is no ambiguity about where those chains lead.
They terminate amongst the addictions carved into the wood.
And suddenly the base isn't a base at all.
It has become the landscape in which the person is trapped.
Different Heights, Different Forms
The blocks rise to different heights.
I like that they don't create a neat, level surface because neither does addiction.
There is no single version of it.
No standard appearance.
No identical experience.
Some addictions are immediately visible.
Others can remain hidden for years.
Some are socially condemned.
Others can initially be praised, rewarded or dismissed as harmless.
And something can exist perfectly normally within one person's life while becoming destructive within another's.
That was important to me.
The word carved into the wood is only the name.
It doesn't tell us the person's story.
From Euphoria to Entrapment
When you follow the entire sculpture, the journey has changed enormously.
At the beginning was Euphoria.
The promise.
The attraction.
The hypnotic pull.
Then came the claws.
The spikes.
The endless search for light.
And finally the chains.
Those chains take us all the way down into this fractured landscape of named addictions.
The promise of freedom has become physical confinement.
And that is the contradiction running through the entire piece.
The thing once reached for as an escape has become the thing the person is now chained to.
But while carving those different addictions into the wooden blocks, another thought began troubling me.
How comfortably could I really stand outside this sculpture and believe those words belonged only to other people?
After all, human beings find countless ways to change how they feel.
We drink.
We eat.
We shop.
We work.
We exercise.
We scroll.
We escape into things.
Most of the time, those behaviours sit perfectly normally within our lives.
But looking down at all those individual blocks made me begin to wonder:
Where exactly is the line?
And how certain can any of us be that we could never cross it?
Chapter 5 – How Close Are We to the Edge?
There was something uncomfortable about creating the Addiction Head.
The longer I worked on it, the harder it became to separate the person we call an addict from the rest of us.
Society likes labels.
Labels create distance.
They allow us to look at somebody whose life has become consumed by an addiction and reassure ourselves that they are somehow different.
That is them.
This is me.
But after carving those different addictions into the blocks beneath the Head, I began questioning how secure that division really is.
Where Is the Line?
Most of us find ways to escape from ourselves occasionally.
We eat.
We drink.
We shop.
We work.
We scroll.
We exercise.
We lose ourselves in television, gaming, social media or countless other things capable of changing how we feel for a while.
Most of those things can exist perfectly comfortably within an ordinary life.
Until perhaps they don't.
And that was what interested me.
Where is the line?
At what point does something we enjoy become something we need?
When does a treat become comfort?
When does comfort become escape?
And when does escape quietly begin taking control?
I don't think there is always a dramatic moment when somebody steps from one side to the other.
Sometimes perhaps the boundary moves so slowly that you don't notice it moving at all.
Them and Us
That thought made this sculpture much more personal for me.
Not because I claim to have lived another person's experience of addiction.
I haven't.
But I recognise something human beneath it.
The desire to alter how we feel.
To reward ourselves.
To quieten something.
To avoid something.
To make a difficult day easier.
That part I understand.
And once I recognised it, I found it much harder to stand safely outside addiction and judge somebody whose search for relief had taken them somewhere far more destructive.
How many circumstances would have to change before any one of us might find ourselves closer to that edge?
A different childhood.
A different trauma.
A different loss.
A different brain.
A different moment of vulnerability.
A different way of coping.
Would I still be me?
Would you still be you?
I don't know.
And perhaps admitting that matters.
Because judgement becomes very easy when we convince ourselves that another person's behaviour could never belong to us.
The Person Behind the Label
None of this means pretending addiction doesn't cause damage.
I've seen enough within my own family to know otherwise.
Addiction can hurt the person experiencing it.
It can hurt the people who love them.
It can damage relationships and leave consequences that remain long after the moment of euphoria has disappeared.
Understanding that someone is struggling does not require us to pretend those consequences don't exist.
But neither should those consequences erase the human being beneath them.
My father's struggles with alcohol affected my life.
There are questions about him that I will probably never be able to answer.
What was he carrying?
What did alcohol give him that made him return to it?
What was he trying to quieten?
I don't know.
I only ever knew the part of the story I could see.
Perhaps creating this sculpture was partly my attempt to look beyond that.
Not to excuse what addiction can do.
But to understand that there is always a person on the other end of the chain.
Looking at Myself
By the time I finished the Addiction Head, I realised the sculpture had turned one of its questions back onto me.
It was easy to carve words into blocks.
Easy to identify different addictions.
Easy to create claws and chains and show somebody trapped within them.
Much harder was asking myself:
How different am I really?
I have my own ways of coping.
My own ways of escaping.
My own things I reach for when life becomes difficult.
Perhaps most of us do.
The difference may lie in what we reach for, why we reach for it, how often we need it and whether we can still choose to walk away.
And suddenly that comfortable dividing line between them and us becomes considerably less certain.
That was probably the most important thing this sculpture gave back to me.
I began it looking at addiction from the outside.
I finished it understanding that the desire beneath it — to escape, to quieten, to change how we feel — is profoundly human.
I began the sculpture looking at addiction.
I finished it looking at the human need to escape.
And that is something I cannot place safely on somebody else's side of the line.
Discover The Disorderly Demise of the Cerebral Cortex as a complete collection. Meet all seven Heads, explore the ideas that connect them and see how each sculpture approaches a different experience of the human mind.
Step behind the finished sculptures and see how the Heads were actually made. From moulding my own face and experimenting with materials to painting their interiors, constructing their individual plinths and solving the inevitable problems along the way — this is the making of the collection.
The Addiction Head is part of The Disorderly Demise of the Cerebral Cortex, a collection of seven contemporary sculptures exploring mental health, identity and the hidden landscapes of the human mind. Each sculpture tells a different story, inviting viewers to look beyond diagnosis and discover the person within. Explore the collection:
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