The Depression Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan: Behind the Mask of the Hidden Mind
Updated: Aug 31
Depression Sculpture by Julia O'Sullivan
The Depression Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan is a deeply personal exploration of the hidden reality of depression. Inspired by her husband’s lifelong experience with the condition, this powerful artwork examines the divide between the person shown to the world and the emotional struggle hidden beneath the surface.
Through haunting symbolism—a fragmented identity, a false smile, a caged sky and a mind fighting to reconnect with happiness—the sculpture explores depression not as a loss of self, but as a journey to rediscover the person who remains beyond the illness.
Chapter 2: What I had Failed to Understand
Chapter 4: Standing Beside Depression
Chapter 5: The Perosn Who Was There All ALong
Chapter 1 – The Beginning: Seeing Beyond the Mask
Depression has been part of my life for more than twenty years, not because I live with it myself, but because I have lived beside someone who does.
My husband, Pat.
When we first met, I didn't understand depression.
There were times when Pat would become quiet and distant, and I would look at his face and convince myself that the expression I was seeing was disappointment in me.
Had I done something wrong?
Was he unhappy with me?
Was there something he wasn't telling me?
I interpreted what I could see through my own emotions because I didn't yet understand what was happening inside him.
It took me a long time to realise something that now seems incredibly important.
That expression was not about me.
It was depression.
And there is an enormous difference between the two.
You Can't Move Away From Your Own Mind
At one point, we wondered whether changing our lives might change how Pat felt.
Perhaps a new environment would help.
A different pace.
A different country.
We moved first to Australia and later to New Zealand, building a new life on the other side of the world.
But depression came too.
You can change the scenery.
You can change your job.
You can change your routine.
You can travel thousands of miles.
But you cannot simply move away from your own mind.
That was something I came to understand gradually.
Depression wasn't a reflection of whether Pat had a good life or whether the people around him loved him enough.
It wasn't ingratitude.
And it wasn't something I could fix simply by making life happier around him.
I had to learn that too.
“Oh My God, I've Been Happy All Week”
Eventually, Pat sought help and began receiving treatment.
And then something happened that has stayed with me ever since.
One day he suddenly said:
“Oh my God, I've been happy all week.”
Such a simple sentence.
But I remember the significance of it.
For Pat to suddenly recognise happiness meant he had also recognised its absence.
Something I might have taken for granted had become noticeable to him precisely because it had been missing.
It made me realise how easy it is to judge another person's emotional world by what we can see from the outside.
I had spent years looking at Pat.
But looking at someone isn't necessarily the same as understanding what is happening inside them.
And that became the starting point for the Depression Head.
I didn't want to sculpt a person looking sad.
That would have been far too simple.
I wanted to explore the distance between the face the world sees and the person living behind it.
Because sometimes the greatest part of depression is the part we cannot see.
Chapter 2 – What I had Failed to Understand
For a long time, I thought I understood depression because I could see its effects.
I didn't.
I understood what it looked like from where I was standing.
That is not the same thing.
Living beside Pat taught me that depression doesn't necessarily announce itself in the way we expect.
It doesn't always look like tears.
It doesn't always look like despair.
And it certainly doesn't mean that someone has nothing in their life to be happy about.
A person can laugh.
Work.
Love their family.
Join in.
Make jokes.
Have moments when everything appears perfectly normal.
And still live with depression.
That was difficult for me to understand at first.
If there were good things around us, why couldn't they simply break through?
Why couldn't happiness overpower whatever was happening inside?
Over time, I began to understand that I was asking the wrong questions.
The Person and the Depression
One of the most important things I had to learn was to separate Pat from his depression.
The silence wasn't Pat rejecting me.
The distance wasn't necessarily Pat withdrawing from our life.
The darkness I sometimes saw in him wasn't the whole of who he was.
It was something affecting him.
That distinction became enormously important when I began thinking about the sculpture.
Because if depression could exist within someone without becoming the entirety of that person, then I didn't want to create a sculpture in which depression was the person.
Somewhere beneath it had to be Pat.
The man I knew.
The man who could laugh until he cried.
The man who has been my rock.
The man capable of happiness, love, humour and all the other things that depression could sometimes make harder for him to reach.
That gave me the central idea for the artwork.
What if the person was still there, but depression was preventing us from seeing them?
And perhaps even more importantly:
What if depression was preventing them from reaching parts of themselves too?
That was when I stopped thinking about creating one face.
I needed two.
One for what we see.
And another for what is hidden behind it.
Chapter 3 – The Person Behind the Mask
Once I understood that I wanted to separate the person from the depression, the sculpture began to take shape.
I needed two heads.
The first would be what we encounter from the outside.
The second would exist behind it.
The person we don't immediately see.
The Clown Mask
Across the exterior face I painted a clown-like mask.
The idea came from something I had observed many times: the ability to perform happiness even when happiness isn't necessarily what is being felt inside.
We learn how to present ourselves to the world.
We smile.
We answer, “I'm fine.”
We go to work.
We talk to people.
We carry on.
The mask allowed me to create that divide between appearance and experience.
But I didn't want it to be a perfect mask.
The face is fragmented and disrupted because something beneath it is affecting the surface.
Depression may be hidden, but that doesn't mean it leaves no trace.
Look Through the Eyes
The eyes of the outer head are missing.
This was deliberate.
Rather than giving the sculpture conventional painted eyes, I wanted the viewer to physically look through them.
At first you encounter the mask.
Then you realise there is something behind it.
Through those empty eye sockets, another head becomes visible.
Suddenly you are no longer simply looking at the person.
You are looking through the exterior they present to the world.
And that is where the real person is waiting.
The Second Head
Behind the first face sits another head.
This was incredibly important to me.
I didn't want depression to completely replace the person underneath.
The second head represents the self that still exists beyond the illness — the personality, emotions, humour, love and capacity for happiness that may become difficult to reach but have not necessarily disappeared.
This was influenced enormously by my experience with Pat.
The person I knew had always been there.
Depression could obscure him.
It could distance him.
It could make happiness difficult for him to access.
But it wasn't the whole of him.
So I placed that person behind the mask.
The Cage
The second head exists within a cage.
Freedom can be seen beyond it.
There is blue sky.
There are birds.
There is a world outside.
But seeing freedom and being able to reach it are not necessarily the same thing.
That was the contradiction I wanted.
The possibility of happiness exists.
The world hasn't stopped being beautiful.
Life hasn't necessarily stopped offering things worth loving.
But depression can create a barrier between the person and their ability to feel or reach those things.
The cage isn't there because the person has chosen to stay inside.
It represents the feeling of being unable simply to step out.
What Still Exists Inside
Within the hidden head I included flowers and references to happiness and joy.
I wanted something good to remain.
That mattered enormously.
If I had filled the entire interior with darkness, I would have been saying that depression had completely consumed the person.
That wasn't what I had witnessed.
I had seen Pat laugh.
I had seen his humour.
His love.
His kindness.
His capacity for happiness.
Those things had not ceased to exist simply because depression sometimes made them difficult to reach.
So there had to be life inside this head.
There had to be something worth finding.
The Darkness
But something else is there too.
Dark tendrils begin to spread through the sculpture.
I began to think of the depression almost as an entity in its own right.
Something invasive.
Something that could move into the spaces where happiness existed and begin consuming what was good.
It doesn't politely remain in one corner of the mind.
It reaches.
It spreads.
And I didn't want that darkness to stop at the head.
The Darkness Escapes
The darkness travels out of the sculpture and onto the wooden plinth beneath it.
I created branching marks across the wood so that it appears almost as though electricity has travelled through the surface, scorching pathways as it goes.
But the effect wasn't created with electricity.
I made every mark by hand.
I wanted control over exactly how the darkness moved across the wood — where it travelled, where it divided and what it touched.
For me, it became a physical representation of depression escaping beyond the boundaries of the mind.
Because depression doesn't necessarily affect one isolated part of a person's existence.
It can reach relationships.
Work.
Family.
Motivation.
Pleasure.
The things someone once enjoyed.
It can touch the people living alongside it too.
The darkness that begins behind the first head therefore continues into the structure supporting it, infecting whatever it encounters and threatening to devour what is good.
The plinth isn't simply something for the Depression Head to stand upon.
It is part of the story.
The mask may hide the depression from the outside world.
But beneath it, the darkness is already travelling.
And the depression has reached the world beyond the head.
Chapter 4 – Standing Beside Depression
Creating the Depression Head placed me in a very different position from some of the other sculptures in this collection.
I wasn't trying to understand the experience of a stranger.
I was trying to understand the experience of the man I had shared my life with for more than twenty years.
And yet there was still a boundary I couldn't cross.
I could live beside Pat's depression.
I could witness it.
I could see how it affected him.
I could see how it affected our relationship and our family.
I could listen when he tried to explain it.
But I could never actually enter his mind and experience it as he did.
That distinction became increasingly important to me while creating this collection.
Being close to someone's experience does not make it your own.
For years I had interpreted Pat's depression from where I was standing.
Sometimes I understood.
Sometimes I didn't.
Sometimes I undoubtedly got it wrong.
There were moments when his distance felt personal.
Times when I wanted an explanation.
Times when I probably wanted him to react in the way I thought he should react.
Because I was experiencing the consequences of something without experiencing the thing itself.
That can be difficult for both people.
Love Doesn't Make You a Mind Reader
When you love someone, there can be a strange assumption that you should automatically understand what they are feeling.
You don't.
Love doesn't give you access to another person's thoughts.
It doesn't allow you to climb inside their head and experience the world exactly as they do.
And it certainly doesn't give you the power to fix everything that hurts them.
That was something I had to learn.
There is a helplessness in watching somebody you love struggle with something you cannot simply remove.
You want to find the right words.
The right solution.
The thing that will make everything better.
But sometimes there isn't a magical sentence.
Sometimes there isn't something you can do that will suddenly make the darkness disappear.
For me, understanding that was part of learning how to stand beside depression rather than constantly trying to solve it.
My View, Not Pat's
The Depression Head therefore isn't Pat's description of depression.
It is mine.
It was created from what I had witnessed, what I had misunderstood, what I had gradually learned and what living beside Pat had allowed me to see.
If Pat had created this sculpture himself, perhaps it would look completely different.
In fact, I would expect it to.
Because this is not an attempt to say:
“This is what depression feels like.”
I cannot say that.
What I can say is:
“This is what I came to understand from loving someone who lives with it.”
And there is an important difference between the two.
Perhaps that is why creating this Head became so personal.
I wasn't only trying to understand depression.
I was also looking back at myself.
At the things I had once taken personally.
At the assumptions I had made.
At the moments I hadn't understood.
And at the man who had been standing behind all of it.
Still Pat.
Always Pat.
Chapter 5 – The Person Who Was There All Along
When I look at the Depression Head now, I don't simply see a sculpture about depression.
I see part of our life.
I see the years when I didn't understand what I was looking at.
The times I mistook distance for disappointment.
The moments when I wondered whether changing our surroundings might somehow change what was happening inside Pat.
I see the journey from not understanding to gradually learning that loving someone doesn't necessarily mean understanding everything they are experiencing.
And I remember one sentence.
“Oh my God, I've been happy all week.”
I don't think Pat realised when he said it how much those words would stay with me.
They were so simple.
Almost funny in their suddenness.
But behind them was the realisation that happiness had returned strongly enough for him to notice it.
And perhaps that is why I filled the hidden part of this sculpture with things that represented happiness and life.
Because those things were still there.
They had always been there.
What I Finally Learned to See
For years, I had sometimes looked at Pat through the depression.
Eventually I learned to look at the depression separately from Pat.
That sounds like a small distinction.
It wasn't.
It changed the way I understood the man standing in front of me.
Depression could affect his mood.
It could change how he interacted with the world.
It could create distance.
It could make happiness difficult to reach.
But it didn't get to claim everything that he was.
Pat was still funny.
Still loving.
Still infuriating.
Still capable of making me laugh.
Still the man who has posed for my paintings, helped build my sculptures, cut wood when I've appeared with yet another strange idea and tolerated more than twenty years of being volunteered for whatever artwork I happened to be making.
Depression was part of our lives.
But it was never the whole of his.
And perhaps that is the most important thing this sculpture eventually came to represent for me.
Behind the mask, behind the cage and beyond the darkness, I wasn't trying to find a diagnosis.
I was trying to find Pat.
The man I married.
The man who became my rock.
The man whose mind I could never completely enter, no matter how close I stood beside him.
The man who was always so much more than the depression I had once struggled to understand.
That is the person I wanted to sculpt.
That is the person I finally learned to see.
And that is the person who was there all along.
"This sculpture is created with permission and love, as a tribute to my husband and the many people who quietly navigate depression every day."
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 Depression 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:
What a fantastic explanation of depression as seen and measured with love absolutely love your inspired sight xx