The Schizophrenia Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan: Exploring Perception, Reality and the Hidden Mind
Updated: Aug 31
Schizophrenia Sculpture by Julia O'Sullivan
The Schizophrenia Sculpture by Julia O’Sullivan explores perception, reality and the hidden experiences of the mind through powerful symbolic contemporary art. Created through research, listening and a desire to challenge misconceptions, this artwork approaches schizophrenia with empathy, curiosity and respect.
Through visual hallucinations, sensory imagery, shadow figures and internal voices, the sculpture explores the complex relationship between the mind and the world around us. More than a representation of a condition, this piece is a conversation about humanity, understanding and seeing beyond stigma.
Chapter 1: Who's Reality is Real?
Chapter 6: I Still Don't Understand
Chapter 1 – Who's Reality is Real?
Schizophrenia was one of the Heads I approached with the greatest caution.
Unlike some of the other conditions in The Disorderly Demise of the Cerebral Cortex, it hadn't entered my life through someone I loved.
I didn't have years of memories.
I hadn't watched somebody close to me living with it.
I couldn't draw upon conversations around the kitchen table or experiences within my own family.
What I had were impressions.
And when I began examining those impressions, I realised something uncomfortable.
Many of them weren't mine at all.
The Schizophrenia I Thought I Knew
Schizophrenia has been used relentlessly within popular culture as shorthand for something frightening, unpredictable or dangerous.
Films.
Headlines.
Fictional characters.
The word itself seemed to arrive carrying an enormous amount of baggage.
But where were the actual people?
Before deciding what this sculpture should look like, I needed to get past everything I thought I knew.
So I researched.
I read first-hand accounts.
I watched people speaking about their lives.
I listened to descriptions of voices, hallucinations, fear, confusion and periods of stability.
And slowly, that convenient image of schizophrenia began falling apart.
Because there wasn't one experience waiting for me underneath the label.
There were individuals.
What Is Normal?
Working in social care has influenced the way I think about difference.
I've seen how easily we construct an idea of what is normal and then measure everybody against it.
How someone should communicate.
How they should behave.
How they should respond.
How they should experience the world.
Step too far outside those expectations and people can become uncomfortable very quickly.
It made me wonder:
Who actually gets to decide what normal is?
And schizophrenia pushed that question somewhere even more difficult.
What happens when the difference isn't simply how somebody behaves?
What happens when it is what they perceive?
When Reality Doesn't Agree
During a difficult period when I was younger, I experienced altered states of perception myself.
I want to be very clear about this.
That was not schizophrenia.
I would never use my experience to claim that I understand what it is like to live with schizophrenia, because I don't.
But it did leave me with something I have never forgotten.
The mind can make an experience feel completely real.
And knowing that unsettled my comfortable assumption that reality is always as fixed and straightforward as we like to believe.
If I see something that you cannot see, which reality am I experiencing?
If I hear something that nobody around me can hear, telling me “there's nothing there” doesn't necessarily make my experience disappear.
To the person experiencing it, something is happening.
That became my way into this sculpture.
I Had to Stand Outside
I couldn't climb inside the mind of someone living with schizophrenia.
Research couldn't give me that ability.
Neither could empathy.
I remained an observer.
But I could listen to people describing what they saw.
I could listen to them describing what they heard.
And I could try to create something from that position without pretending it was anything more than my interpretation.
So I stopped asking:
How do I make a sculpture about schizophrenia?
And began asking something else.
What happens when your experience of reality and everybody else's no longer agree?
That question changed everything.
Because suddenly I knew the sculpture couldn't simply show a face.
I needed to show what was happening around it.
And I needed to show what was happening inside it.
Chapter 2 – When Nobody Else Can See What You See
The most important part of my research wasn't learning a list of symptoms.
It was discovering how inadequate a list of symptoms could be.
A clinical description might use words such as hallucination, delusion or disordered thinking.
Useful words.
Necessary words.
But they couldn't tell me what Tuesday morning might feel like for the person experiencing them.
That came from people's stories.
“But I Can See It”
Some people described seeing things that nobody around them could see.
Others described hearing voices.
Some spoke about sensations, confusion or times when trusting their own perception became extraordinarily difficult.
And I kept returning to the same thought.
What happens when something is completely present within your experience but absent from everybody else's?
Someone standing beside you can say:
There's nothing there.
But you can see it.
They can tell you:
I didn't hear anything.
But you heard it.
That contradiction fascinated and disturbed me.
Because how do you begin to decide which experience to trust when your own senses are telling you one thing and everybody around you is telling you another?
The Loneliness of an Unshared Reality
Perhaps what affected me most during my research wasn't simply the nature of some of the experiences people described.
It was how isolating an experience could become when nobody else shared it.
How do you explain something to another person when the very thing you're trying to explain is inaccessible to them?
How do you ask somebody to understand something they cannot see?
And what happens when their first response is fear rather than curiosity?
I couldn't answer those questions.
But they changed the way I looked at the people whose accounts I was reading.
The hallucination might be extraordinary to me.
The person experiencing it wasn't.
They were still getting through a day.
Still existing within relationships.
Still living a life.
Except sometimes they were also negotiating sights, sounds or experiences that the people around them couldn't perceive.
That was the part I wanted to understand.
What Is This Person Experiencing?
I realised I'd been asking the wrong question.
Instead of:
What is schizophrenia?
I began asking:
What is this person experiencing?
The difference sounds small.
It wasn't.
One question encourages me to categorise.
The other forces me to listen.
And listening also made something else very clear.
There was no single experience for me to sculpt.
One person's account could be completely different from another's.
Something terrifying for one individual might never be experienced by somebody else with the same diagnosis.
The label connected them.
It did not make their realities identical.
Choosing What I Could Show
That eventually gave me permission to stop searching for some impossible universal image of schizophrenia.
I couldn't create that.
Nobody could.
What I could do was take particular experiences that had stayed with me from my research and translate them into my own visual language.
And two things kept separating themselves in my mind.
What could be seen.
And what could be heard.
That distinction gave me the structure of the sculpture.
The visual experiences could exist where we could see them.
Across the outside of the Head.
But the voices felt different.
They belonged somewhere more private.
Somewhere the viewer would have to deliberately look for them.
So I put them inside.
Chapter 3 – What You See. What You Hear.
The outside of the Schizophrenia Head is where perception meets the world.
I wanted the viewer to look at it and immediately feel that something familiar had become uncertain.
Shapes merge.
Images emerge from other images.
Ordinary forms become strange.
Reality doesn't quite behave as expected.
Nothing is there simply to create something frightening.
I wanted to interfere with certainty.
What exactly am I looking at?
That question was important because uncertainty had appeared again and again within the experiences I had been researching.
What You See
Across the surface, the imagery becomes dreamlike and distorted.
Things appear where perhaps they shouldn't.
Forms don't always make immediate sense.
Your eye tries to organise what it is seeing, but the imagery doesn't necessarily cooperate.
That was deliberate.
I wasn't trying to recreate one person's hallucination.
I was creating my own visual response to accounts of seeing things that other people couldn't see.
There is an important difference.
These aren't the hallucinations of somebody living with schizophrenia.
They are the images I created after listening to people describe experiences I could only ever understand from the outside.
What You Feel
Among that imagery are ants crawling across the Head.
They came from another aspect of my research that particularly affected me — descriptions of sensations that could feel physically present.
Imagine feeling something crawling across your skin.
You respond to it.
You can feel it.
And then somebody tells you there is nothing there.
But you felt it.
The ants allowed me to take something invisible and make it visible.
To the viewer they are painted imagery.
Within the idea behind the sculpture, they represent something much more unsettling:
the body experiencing something that the outside world says isn't happening.
The Shadow Figures
Scattered across the surface are small shadowy figures.
Against everything else happening around them, they are easy to overlook.
I wanted them that way.
For me, they represent the individual caught amongst all this noise.
Small human presences surrounded by experiences much larger than themselves.
You can easily become distracted by everything else painted onto the Head.
The strange imagery.
The distortion.
The ants.
The spectacle of it all.
And perhaps that is precisely the point.
You have to remember to look for the person.
Then You Look Inside
The exterior was only half of the story.
Because some of the accounts that stayed with me most weren't about things people could see.
They were about things they could hear.
So I placed the voices inside.
The atmosphere changes completely when you look into the Head.
Three faces surround the inner space.
I didn't create them as monsters or demons.
They represent the voices described within some of the accounts I encountered.
And what disturbed me was what some of those voices said.
They weren't necessarily directing violence towards other people — the frightening stereotype I had absorbed from films and sensational stories.
Some turned their cruelty inwards.
They criticised.
Humiliated.
Undermined.
Attacked self-worth.
And in some accounts, encouraged the person to harm themselves.
Words such as:
“Die.”
“Unworthy.”
I put that cruelty inside the Head because I wanted the viewer to understand something they couldn't necessarily see from the outside.
A person could be standing in front of you while simultaneously experiencing an internal assault you know absolutely nothing about.
Nowhere Quiet
I also brought spiders into the interior.
They occupy the darkness around those faces, adding another layer of unease.
I wanted the inside to feel crowded.
There is no obvious quiet corner.
No easy place to retreat from what is happening.
And that mattered because the voices aren't coming from another person standing across the room.
You cannot necessarily walk into another room and leave them behind.
The sound is already inside.
That thought probably disturbed me more than any other part of the sculpture.
Outside and Inside
Only when you look at both halves does the structure of the Schizophrenia Head become clear.
Outside, I explored experiences connected with seeing and sensing.
Inside, I explored experiences connected with hearing.
One is visible to us because I painted it onto the surface.
The other requires us to deliberately look inside.
And between them sits the person.
Not a monster.
Not the frightening caricature I had encountered so many times before beginning my research.
A human being attempting to navigate experiences I can depict symbolically but will never personally know.
And even then, the story doesn't stop at the Head.
Because beneath all of this, I created another visual disturbance.
This time I didn't paint it.
I built it out of wood.
Chapter 4 – Do I Have the Right to Make This?
There was a question sitting uncomfortably beside me while I created the Schizophrenia Head.
Do I have the right to make this?
It is one thing to transform your own experiences into art.
It is quite another to take experiences belonging to other people and interpret them through your own hands.
And that responsibility bothered me.
When Does Art Become Spectacle?
I didn't want to sensationalise schizophrenia in the very act of trying to challenge its sensationalism.
Nor did I want somebody else's distress to become fascinating imagery simply because it made a powerful sculpture.
That meant I had to question what I was creating.
Particularly when the imagery became darker.
Was this symbol here because it communicated something?
Or because it looked dramatic?
Was I asking the viewer to consider another person's experience?
Or was I turning that experience into spectacle?
Eventually I found myself asking a much more uncomfortable question:
Was I communicating suffering, or was I decorating it?
That's not a particularly comfortable question for an artist.
But perhaps it shouldn't be.
Where Does the Fear Belong?
This became especially important when I started constructing the inside of the Head.
Some of the experiences I had encountered during my research frightened me.
Hearing a voice telling you that you are worthless.
Being told to harm yourself.
Seeing or feeling something that nobody around you can perceive.
I could understand why an experience like that might be terrifying.
But there is an enormous difference between saying:
This experience may be frightening for the person enduring it.
And saying:
This person should frighten us.
Those are not the same thing.
And I needed the sculpture to understand the difference.
The fear belongs to the experience.
Not to the human being.
The Distance Between Us
There was another uncomfortable truth I couldn't escape.
I was interpreting all of this from the outside.
I could research.
I could listen.
I could take people's descriptions seriously.
I could question my own assumptions.
But none of those things gave me ownership of their experience.
Empathy doesn't magically transport us inside somebody else's mind.
And perhaps pretending that it does can become another form of arrogance.
There is a distance between observing an experience and living it.
That distance exists within this sculpture.
I cannot remove it.
And I don't think I should pretend to.
What Could I Make?
Once I accepted that, my responsibility became clearer.
I wasn't trying to recreate schizophrenia.
I couldn't.
I wasn't saying:
This is what schizophrenia looks like.
And certainly not:
This is what schizophrenia feels like.
What I could do was take the things I had learned, translate some of them through my own visual language and create a doorway into questions the viewer might never previously have considered.
I could bring them closer.
But I couldn't take them all the way inside another person's mind.
Nobody can.
And perhaps acknowledging that boundary rather than disguising it made the sculpture more truthful.
This is not schizophrenia through the eyes of someone who lives with it.
It is one artist standing outside, listening, questioning and trying very hard not to mistake interpretation for experience.
Chapter 5 – When the Base Distorts Your Eyes
The Schizophrenia Head doesn't end at the Head.
As with every sculpture in this collection, I wanted the plinth beneath it to continue the story.
But this time I wanted to do something slightly different.
I had spent so long thinking about perception — about seeing something another person couldn't see, experiencing something another person couldn't experience — that I wanted the base to involve the viewer's own eyes.
Even if only for a moment.
Building a Wooden Labyrinth
I constructed the plinth from strips of contrasting woods.
Rather than laying them in a simple pattern, I repeatedly turned them inwards.
One direction becomes another.
Then another.
Then another.
The pattern becomes smaller as it travels towards the centre until your eye is drawn right into it.
It looks almost like a tunnel disappearing into the wood.
But of course it isn't.
The surface is flat.
And that was precisely what interested me.
Your Eyes Know. But They Follow Anyway.
You know you are looking at pieces of timber laid into a wooden surface.
Nothing is actually descending.
There is no hole.
There is nowhere for the pattern to go.
And yet your eyes follow it.
Inwards.
Around another corner.
Further towards the centre.
For a brief moment, something completely ordinary — pieces of wood — begins playing with your perception.
I liked that.
Because throughout this sculpture I had been asking the viewer to think about experiences they couldn't share.
Here, I could make their own vision participate.
Not by pretending this simple optical effect tells them anything about what schizophrenia feels like.
It doesn't.
But by reminding them how easily the eye can be persuaded to see depth, movement or direction where physically there is none.
From the Head Into the Wood
The metal supports rise directly from this pattern and carry the Head above it.
So visually, the journey runs all the way through the sculpture.
The exterior disrupts what we see.
The interior explores what might be heard.
And beneath them, the wood quietly interferes with our perception again.
The materials have changed.
The question hasn't.
How much can we trust what our senses tell us?
Look Again
Perhaps that's why this plinth became so important to me.
It doesn't explain schizophrenia.
I wouldn't want it to.
It does something much smaller.
It asks you to look.
Then look again.
You know what is physically in front of you.
Wood.
Different grains.
Different tones.
A flat surface.
But your eyes want to take you somewhere else.
And for this particular sculpture, that seemed rather fitting.
The Head asks you to consider another person's perception.
The plinth makes you question your own.
Chapter 6 — I Still Don't Understand
When I look at the completed Schizophrenia Head, I don't see an answer to schizophrenia.
I see the result of trying to understand something that exists outside my own experience.
And perhaps one of the most important things this sculpture taught me was that understanding doesn't always mean arriving at an answer.
Sometimes it means becoming more aware of what you don't know.
I began this Head carrying impressions of schizophrenia that I hadn't properly questioned.
Research dismantled many of them.
Listening replaced some of them.
But it didn't leave me believing that I now understood what it was like to live with schizophrenia.
I don't.
Perhaps That's the Point
There can be a temptation, particularly when creating art about difficult subjects, to arrive at some grand conclusion.
I don't have one.
I cannot tell you what schizophrenia feels like.
I cannot tell you what it is like to hear a voice nobody else can hear.
I cannot tell you what it is like to see something everyone around you insists isn't there.
And I cannot compress the experiences of millions of different people into one sculpted Head and call it truth.
What I can tell you is that I came away from making it less certain of the things I thought I knew.
And I value that.
Looking Beyond the Spectacle
The strange imagery is probably what attracts attention first.
The distorted forms.
The ants.
The shadow figures.
The faces inside.
The words.
The spiders.
There is plenty to look at.
But somewhere amongst all that visual noise is the thing I don't want the viewer to lose.
The person experiencing it.
Not a horror-film character.
Not a sensational headline.
Not a diagnosis made frightening through somebody else's imagination.
A person.
And perhaps that is why the small shadow figures on the surface matter to me so much.
You have to look for them.
It would be very easy to become distracted by everything happening around them.
What Changed Was Me
I began this sculpture asking questions about schizophrenia.
I finished it questioning some of my own assumptions.
That feels like an important difference.
The sculpture didn't give me access to somebody else's reality.
It couldn't.
Instead, it made me more conscious of the distance between us — and more willing to listen across it.
Perhaps that is where understanding sometimes begins.
Not with saying:
“I know how you feel.”
But with being able to say:
“I don't know how this feels for you. Tell me.”
Because beyond every diagnosis, beyond every symptom and beyond every misconception, there is, and always will be, a human being asking only to be understood.
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 Schizophrenia 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:
Comments