Glue Babies and visualizing depression in art

Hello all, it’s been a very long time since I posted here and I have been thinking where I want the digital home of the Glue Babies to be. While I think about that though, I have some new pieces for July that I wanted to explain in more detail. I hope you enjoy reading more about them below.

As many or most of you know, my art is about chronic illness. I try to only create art about conditons for which I have some frame of reference. One condition I have not yet created art about is depression, which is what this mini series for the July 2026 collection works to represent visually.

One symbol that I use continuously is the ocean and many of my pieces have the ocean/sea as inspiration. For these pieces I used an oil spill as a starting point. Emotionally, I see depression in a similar way, something sludgy, slow moving but encompassing, hard to simply wash away, bubbling to the surface and smothering the life below.

In these pieces I have the white pearls becoming contaminated with the inky sludge upon which the pieces rest. I started with blue black pearls but switched to white as I went along so the visual would be more clear. The white and black pearls felt like a clear way to symbolize the struggle to keep depression away.

Depression is different for everyone, of course, but it’s often misunderstood as simple sadness. I have always heard that depression, clinical depression, is depressive symptoms in the absence of a reason. If life is bad and you are sad about it, that is a healthy human response, part of what motivates to change our lives. Depression is not that. Long term depression feels - or at least felt for me - like a slow extinguishing of every emotion. It wasn’t sadness, it was emptiness. The way oil suffocates the life underneath it in the sea felt like an appropriate image.

While this post is just meant to shine a bit more light on the meaning behind my work, know that I am completely fine now and have been for some time, so please don’t worry about me.

If you are experiencing symptoms of depression please reach out to a mental health professional. Think of them as a guide who will take you by the hand and lead you back to where you need to be. I promise it’s worth it to clamor back up out of the sludge, as hard as it is, and getting help is the absolutely hardest step. It’s unfair that the hardest step is the first one, but you can do it and you will do it. If finding someone to talk to is too much right now, call or text 988 and they will help connect you with resources.