Tale of a Worried Man (2019) Poetry and spoken word written by Heather and Mark Waterfield, performance and headdress by Heather Waterfield.

*Please note the following content refers to suicide and mental illness. Please be aware before reading on.*

This short film aims to raise awareness for and reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness, by attempting to understand and get into the mind of a sufferer. The performance piece is a creative and emotional response to the intense grief I was experiencing during that time, a response I had suppressed for years following his death. The project and performance allowed me to begin to work through the loss of my father to suicide, after a life battling with Bipolar Disorder. A life which was cut short by his mental state aged 49.

After my father passed on so suddenly, I clung to as many of his belongings as I could, holding on to the smallest of things. I attempted to find the strength to look through one of his journals for inspiration, for the first time 3 years after his tragic and violent death. It was filled with his writing, poems, quotes, song lyrics, angry political musings and rants... It was evident he had written some (perhaps most) of them during his manic episodes, or periods of depression and despair over the state of the world, and his life. I lifted some of his handwritten words and used his journals as inspiration to ‘co-write’ a dark poem from the point of view of someone suffering from mental illness or manic depression, to use as a spoken word voiceover in the performance. The Many Faces headdress which I made by hand aims to visually represent the stages of mania.

Many faces headdress (2019). Sculpted from papier mache, hand-made paper clay, coated in white emulsion paint and pva glue, by Heather Waterfield.