Untangling Thoughts is being inaugurated on April 22

Seher’s exhibition called Untangling Thoughts will inaugurate on April 22 atv 4 pm at the
Sukriti Art Gallery , at Jawahar kala Kendra, Jaipur by Dr Sudhir Bhandari, Principal, SMS Medical College & Hospital.

About Untangling Thoughts

The exhibition will express individuals dealing with mental health issues often express themselves in drawings and paintings. The creation of art helps in exploring emotions and coping with stress. It helps in finding new ways to gain personal insight and develop skills to overcome anxieties. A traditional art class is normally focused on teaching technique or creating a specific finished product, but art therapy is more about letting an individual focus on their inner experience. Individuals facing mental illness create art that expresses their inner world more than making something that is an expression of the outer world. People who have experienced emotional trauma, anxiety, depression, and other psychological issues can benefit from expressing themselves creatively.

According to a 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, less than an hour of creative activity can reduce your stress substantially and have a positive effect on your mental health, regardless of artistic experience or talent. A 2017 study found that art displayed in hospital settings contributed to an environment where patients felt safe. It also played a role in improving socialization and maintaining an identity outside of the hospital.
Seher creates works, which reflect the deeper anxieties, feelings, and insecurities. Without any formal training, she transforms her moods into beautiful paintings. The paintings show Seher’s inner being, her struggle with depression and how she fought with it and still continues to fight.

Seher’s paintings express their feelings

Seher’s paintings are her only companions in low moods. On certain occasions when her irritability and restlessness grew. She experienced feeling of hopelessness and felt worthless. She thought of death and suicide, many a times she tried to harm herself and became violent. Invariably, after every violent episode, she blocked herself off from everyone and sat and painted for hours. Her paintings reflected her moods and had a soothing effect on her nerves. These were never planned and premeditated paintings.
They represent her relationship with the outside world, inner-self, anger and joy, friendships and breakups, conflicts and resolutions, her paintings are ‘Seher’ with all her complexities. When she paints, the hazy thoughts start calming down and she is able to focus again. The hours of hard work would create all kinds of abstracts. She never uses regular paints; she likes and continues to paint with ink. Seher draws a lot of trees. They were all dry trees initially but over a period of time she started painting colorful leaves. Colors which do not exist in nature, perhaps, but colors that reflect her moods.
Sometimes she portrays herself as a lonely bird, while everything around her is vibrant and
colorful, the yearning to be rooted, to be happy is portrayed through many trees, which are colorful and firmly standing, yet in one painting one can see the sun pushing down the beautiful tree reflecting the weight of her complex thoughts and feelings, which does not allow her to bloom.
There are many paintings using mandala art designs interwoven with multiple lines criss-crossing each other, perhaps representing a state of her mind in constant confusion that does not allow her to enjoy the bright world around her.
Healing is a slow process; Seher is not only fighting herself but helping a lot of others by fighting the taboo attached to mental illness.