The Bipolar Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan: Exploring the Highs, Lows and Hidden Landscapes of the Mind
Updated: Aug 31
Bipolar Sculpture by Julia O'Sullivan
The Bipolar Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan explores the complex emotional landscape of bipolar disorder, moving beyond the stereotypes of highs and lows to reveal the human experience behind the diagnosis. Created through extensive research and real personal accounts, this powerful artwork represents one person navigating two opposing states of mind.
Through contrasting imagery of carnival-like energy, darkness, hooks, cobwebs and connection, the sculpture explores the intensity, struggle and resilience of those living with bipolar disorder. A deeply symbolic piece that invites empathy, understanding and reflection on the complexity of the human mind.
Chapter 1 – More Than Highs and Lows
When I began researching bipolar disorder, I kept encountering the same description.
Highs and lows.
It sounds so simple.
Almost like a graph.
Up.
Down.
Up again.
But the more I read and listened, the more inadequate those two words began to feel.
The experiences people described weren't simply changes in mood.
They could affect energy, thoughts, behaviour, relationships, confidence, judgement and the way someone experienced themselves and the world around them.
And importantly, there wasn't one universal experience.
The diagnosis might have a name.
The person living with it remained entirely individual.
Listening From the Outside
Bipolar disorder is not something I have personally experienced.
So I approached this Head as an observer.
I researched.
I read accounts from people living with the condition.
I listened to experiences from those around them.
And I tried to understand without pretending that research could put me inside somebody else's mind.
One story in particular stayed with me.
A friend spoke to me about her sister's experience of bipolar disorder.
What struck me wasn't simply the severity of what her sister had experienced.
It was how far its influence reached.
Her experiences had affected the way she thought about her future, her relationships and even whether she wanted to have children.
There was a fear that something she had struggled with so profoundly might one day be passed on, and that another person might have to endure what she had.
That stayed with me.
Because suddenly I wasn't thinking about highs and lows at all.
I was thinking about an entire life.
One Person
As I continued researching, one thing became increasingly important.
I didn't want bipolar disorder to become two characters.
The happy person and the sad person.
The manic person and the depressed person.
Two opposing versions competing for ownership of the same body.
That felt far too simplistic.
There is only one person.
One identity.
One life being lived through experiences that can sometimes be extraordinarily different.
And that became the starting point for the sculpture.
How could I create two opposing worlds without accidentally creating two different people?
How could one artwork contain elevation and collapse?
Light and darkness?
Energy and exhaustion?
And still make it absolutely clear that beneath all of those contrasts was the same human being?
That was the problem I needed to solve.
And eventually I realised that one face wasn't going to be enough.
I needed two.
Chapter 2 – Between Elevation and Descent
Once I had decided that one face wasn't enough, I had to decide what those two faces were actually going to show.
I didn't want something as simplistic as happy and sad.
That wasn't what I had been reading about at all.
The contrast I kept encountering was much more powerful than that.
It was almost as though the same world could be experienced through two completely different lenses.
When Everything Feels Possible
In accounts of mania, I read descriptions of extraordinary energy.
Thoughts accelerating.
Ideas arriving faster than they could be contained.
Confidence expanding.
Creativity intensifying.
Sleep becoming less important.
The world could feel alive with possibility.
There was something intoxicating about some of those descriptions.
But I also had to be careful.
I didn't want to romanticise mania by turning it into the colourful, exciting half of the sculpture.
Because that same intensity could move beyond exhilaration.
Thoughts could become difficult to control.
Confidence could become impulsivity.
Decisions could carry consequences.
Energy could become agitation.
What initially sounded like freedom could become something far less controllable.
That contradiction fascinated me.
How do you paint something that can feel exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time?
When the World Falls Away
Then I encountered the other side of that contrast.
Depression.
Here, everything seemed to descend.
Energy disappeared.
Thoughts became heavier.
The world that had appeared full of possibility could become difficult simply to move through.
And again, I didn't want to reduce that to sadness.
Sadness was far too small a word.
What I was trying to understand was the enormous change in how the same person might experience their own world.
That gave me the physical movement I needed.
One part of my sculpture would rise.
The other would fall.
But Where Does One End and the Other Begin?
There was another problem.
If I made the contrast too absolute, I risked suggesting that bipolar disorder consisted of only two positions.
Up or down.
Mania or depression.
Light or darkness.
But people don't exist as switches.
The accounts I researched described periods between episodes, different intensities and experiences that varied enormously from one person to another.
So although I was using two contrasting states to create the visual language of the sculpture, I knew they could never represent the entirety of bipolar disorder.
They were my way of exploring contrast, not defining everybody's experience.
That distinction mattered.
The Same Face
And this brought me back to the most important decision of all.
Both Heads would be made from my face.
The same features.
The same starting point.
The same person.
But I would send them in opposite directions.
One would be pulled downwards.
The other would rise dramatically above it.
I wasn't creating two identities.
I was taking one identity and asking what would happen if I placed it within two profoundly different emotional landscapes.
And once I had those two faces in front of me, I could begin building those worlds around them.
One would descend into darkness.
The other was about to explode into colour.
Chapter 3 – Between the Carnival and the Darkness
Once I had my two faces, I could begin creating the worlds they inhabited.
And I wanted them to feel completely different.
One would be dark, heavy and almost suffocating.
The other would become a carnival — bright, energetic, excessive and slightly out of control.
This was where the Bipolar Head really began to come alive.
The Descent
The lower Head faces downwards.
I wanted gravity itself to become part of the sculpture.
Rather than simply painting depression onto a face, I positioned the entire Head as though it were being pulled towards the ground.
Everything about this side needed to feel heavy.
The colours became darker.
Movement diminished.
And across the face I painted hooks.
For me, those hooks became the invisible things capable of pulling someone further down.
Thoughts.
Memories.
Fear.
Emotional weight.
Things nobody else can necessarily see, but which can nevertheless exert an enormous pull.
The person may want to rise.
The hooks pull in the opposite direction.
Caught in the Web
Then came the cobwebs.
I liked the idea of something that doesn't necessarily trap you all at once.
A web can accumulate.
It can spread.
It can become increasingly difficult to move through.
So I allowed cobwebs and spiders to inhabit this darker world.
The spiders add something more unsettling.
They suggest those thoughts and fears that sit within the darkness — sometimes quiet, sometimes waiting, but never entirely absent.
I wasn't trying to illustrate depression literally.
I was trying to create a place that felt difficult to escape from.
A world of downward movement, entanglement and weight.
And then, directly behind it, I did almost the complete opposite.
Welcome to the Carnival
The second Head rises upwards and explodes into colour.
For mania, I chose the imagery of a carnival.
It felt perfect.
Carnivals are exciting.
Colourful.
Noisy.
Seductive.
Everything flashes, moves and demands your attention.
There is spectacle everywhere.
But stay within that environment long enough and the excitement can become overwhelming.
That contradiction was exactly what interested me.
I didn't want mania represented simply as happiness.
I wanted intensity.
The colours became brighter.
The imagery became busier.
Bubbles appeared around the face.
Everything seemed to be moving.
There is an exuberance to this side of the sculpture, but there is very little stillness.
The world has been turned up.
When Everything Is at Full Volume
The carnival allowed me to explore something I had encountered repeatedly during my research: the possibility that heightened energy can initially feel extraordinary.
Ideas.
Confidence.
Creativity.
Possibility.
Everything can appear larger.
Brighter.
Faster.
But I deliberately pushed the imagery towards excess because I didn't want the viewer to mistake this for uncomplicated joy.
The carnival is beautiful, but it isn't calm.
There is too much happening.
Too much colour.
Too much movement.
Too much stimulation.
What might initially attract you can eventually become difficult to control.
That was the manic world I wanted to create.
Not happiness.
Amplification.
The Fingers Between Them
Then there are the fingers.
They weave around the two Heads and, for me, became one of the most important physical elements of the sculpture.
They prevent the two worlds from becoming completely separate.
The fingers move between them.
Around them.
Connecting them.
They create a physical relationship between the darkness below and the carnival rising above it.
I needed that connection because otherwise the sculpture could easily be read as two independent portraits placed together.
That wasn't what I wanted.
The contrast needed to be enormous.
But the separation could never be complete.
Two Worlds in One Sculpture
Looking at the finished Heads, almost everything appears to oppose itself.
Darkness against colour.
Downward against upward.
Stillness against movement.
Weight against elevation.
Cobwebs against bubbles.
The imagery pulls in completely different directions.
And yet the fingers keep bringing the two worlds back together.
That was important.
Because the Bipolar Head was never intended to say:
Here are two people.
It asks something much more interesting:
How can one person experience the world from such profoundly different emotional positions?
But the connection between those two worlds doesn't end with the fingers.
It continues beneath the Heads themselves.
Right down into the wood on which they stand.
And that is where I made the division between them physically visible.
Chapter 4 – The Story Continues Into the Base
Chapter 4 — The Story Continues Into the Base
It would have been easy to finish the story with the two Heads.
But I didn't want the plinth beneath them simply to be something they stood upon.
As with every sculpture in this collection, the base had to continue the narrative.
So I took the division already running through the Bipolar Head and carried it down into the wood.
Dark Walnut and Light Ash
I chose two contrasting woods.
Dark walnut and pale ash.
Placed together, the difference between them is immediate.
One side is deep and dark.
The other is considerably lighter.
They became a continuation of the opposing worlds above them — the darkness and the light, the descent and the elevation.
But I didn't cut them into two tidy halves.
The line between them moves organically through the centre of the plinth.
Because I wasn't interested in creating two perfectly separate boxes.
The whole point of this sculpture was that these experiences belong to one person.
And that presented me with another problem.
How do I divide something while simultaneously showing that it cannot truly be divided?
Making the Divide Visible
Between the walnut and ash, I created a channel.
Into that channel I placed gold smalti.
I love the fact that this makes the division impossible to ignore.
The boundary doesn't disappear.
It becomes part of the design.
You can physically see where one wood ends and the other begins.
But I didn't want that line to suggest separation.
So I crossed it.
Binding the Two Sides Together
Across the divide are steel bars.
They travel from one wood into the other, physically joining the two sides.
That detail became incredibly important.
Because however different the woods appear, they still belong to one plinth.
Neither half stands independently.
The steel binds them into a single structure.
And suddenly the base was saying exactly what I had been trying to communicate through the two Heads above it.
Two contrasting worlds.
One structure.
The division exists.
The contrast exists.
But so does the connection.
Follow the Sculpture Down
If you follow the whole artwork from top to bottom, the same conversation keeps repeating visually, but through completely different materials.
Above, one Head falls while another rises.
One disappears into darkness while the other erupts into the chaos of the carnival.
The fingers move between them, preventing those two worlds from becoming completely detached.
Then your eye travels down the metal supports towards the plinth.
And there it is again.
Dark against light.
Walnut against ash.
A visible divide.
And steel crossing directly through it.
The story hasn't stopped at the face.
It has travelled all the way into the wood.
One Sculpture
That is why the base matters so much to me.
Without it, the two Heads could still be viewed primarily through their differences.
The plinth brings them back together.
It doesn't erase the contrast.
It doesn't attempt to blend the dark wood into the light or pretend the divide isn't there.
Instead, it allows both to exist while physically holding them together.
And perhaps that is the simplest way I found to express what I had been struggling with since I first began researching this Head.
I wasn't trying to create two people.
I wasn't even trying to make two separate sculptures.
I was trying to contain two profoundly contrasting emotional landscapes within one continuous form.
From the Heads.
Through the fingers.
Down the steel.
And finally into the wood beneath them.
Different. Divided. Connected.
One sculpture. One person.
Chapter 5 – The Person Between the Moments
When I finished the Bipolar Head, I found myself thinking less about bipolar disorder and more about something we all do to one another.
We remember people by their moments.
The moment they behaved strangely.
The moment they said something inappropriate.
The moment they withdrew.
The moment they frightened us, embarrassed us or behaved in a way we couldn't understand.
Sometimes we take one fragment of somebody's life and allow that fragment to become our definition of them.
Creating this sculpture made me question how unfair that can be.
A Life Is Bigger Than an Episode
The story my friend shared with me about her sister had stayed in my mind throughout the making of this Head.
But by the end, it wasn't the details of her bipolar disorder that I kept returning to.
It was the fact that here was a woman thinking about her future.
Her relationships.
Motherhood.
The possibility of passing something she had struggled with so profoundly to another generation.
Those weren't symptoms on a diagnostic list.
They were enormous, deeply human decisions.
And it made me realise how much disappears when we look at somebody only through the most visible moments of a mental health condition.
We don't necessarily see the private decisions.
The compromises.
The fears they may never voice.
The relationships they are trying to protect.
The plans they make.
The plans they abandon.
Or simply the ordinary person trying to build a life around something they did not choose.
The People Standing Beside Them
There are also the people around that person.
Partners.
Parents.
Siblings.
Children.
Friends.
They have their own experiences too.
They may love someone enormously while struggling to understand what is happening.
They may be frightened.
Confused.
Frustrated.
Helpless.
They may desperately want to enter the world of someone they love and discover that there are places they simply cannot follow.
I think that's important too.
There doesn't always have to be a villain.
Sometimes there are simply people trying to navigate something extraordinarily complicated together.
What Could I Really Know?
I had approached this sculpture from the outside.
I could research bipolar disorder.
I could listen to people who had experienced it.
I could hear the experiences of families.
I could take what I learned and translate some of those ideas into colour, darkness, carnival imagery, hooks, cobwebs, fingers, wood and steel.
But I could never know exactly what it feels like to inhabit somebody else's mind.
That isn't what this sculpture claims to do.
It is my response to what I learned.
And perhaps recognising the limits of my understanding became part of what I learned too.
Because the longer I spent trying to understand bipolar disorder, the less interested I became in defining it.
I became much more interested in the person living their life around it.
The Person
When I look at the finished sculpture now, there is plenty to attract the eye.
The carnival.
The darkness.
The two Heads.
The contrast between them.
The walnut and ash.
The gold divide.
The steel binding everything together.
But none of those things is the person.
They are the visual language I used to explore something happening to a person.
And that distinction matters.
A diagnosis can explain something.
Behaviour can reveal something.
An episode can affect everything.
But none of them contains the entirety of a human being.
Perhaps that is what I want someone to remember when they have finished looking at this sculpture.
Not the carnival.
Not the darkness.
Not even the extraordinary contrast between them.
The person.
The person before the moment.
The person within the moment.
And the person who remains when that moment has passed.
Because somewhere beyond everything we can observe from the outside is somebody continuing with the complicated business of being human.
And they deserve to be remembered for more than their most difficult moments.
Because behind every high, every low and every battle fought within the mind, there is still a person searching for balance, connection and the simple freedom to be seen not for their illness, but for who they truly are.
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 Bipolar 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 Heads:
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