Photo by Ståle Grut on Unsplash

There was a moment, last weekend, when I stood in the National Gallery in London, and began to wonder if my research was haunting me. Perhaps this is a sense all researchers get at one point or another; that their work starts to crop up in unexpected places and times, as if they can’t escape it. In my case, I was stood in the National Gallery’s excellent bicentenary exhibit ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’, reading a quote writ large on the wall, excerpted from the artist’s letter to Emile Bernard:

“You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines … gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer.”

Van Gogh was writing from Saint-Paul’s Hospital at Saint-Rémy where he was staying following what the exhibit describes as “series of mental breakdowns”; in the letter he was describing his paintings of the garden outside his window. I was surprised a little by his use of that word, anxiety, which has become such a cornerstone in our modern discourse of mental health, and which has been my topic of study for the past two years. But more than that, I was taken by his analysis of the very colours which could create such an emotion – as I looked at the painting he described I didn’t disagree with Van Gogh’s assessment. I wondered, what was it about these colours that entangled with anxiety? Their intensity? Their uncertainty? Their unusual combination? How do we represent anxiety in colour? In the Pixar Inside Out films anxiety is orange but fear is purple – who can tell what Van Gogh would have made of that! There has been another post on this blog about the relation between Van Gogh’s art and talk about madness.

But it’s that very question, of how we see anxiety, of how we identify it and how we represent it, that I’ve been studying. Indeed, I talked with 24 people with experience of debilitating anxiety, who shared with me where in fiction they’d seen anxiety – from The Big Bang Theory to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. And one of the things that stood out in these conversations, was that while anxiety can often be an experience that is deeply internal or can seem invisible to those around us, in media like films and TV shows, both audiences and creators often relied on bodies and movement to convey anxiety. It might be a specific physical experience like a panic attack or hyperventilation, or it might be something subtler, like facial expressions or a way of moving.

As I though about this, I realised that in fact anxiety (or its representation) had been following me even before the word turned up with Van Gogh. The night before I’d gone with my mother to see the Royal Ballet’s production of Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Maddaddam, an adaptation of a dystopian trilogy by Margaret Atwood. The ballet touches on notes of peace, sorrow, love, and violence, but in its second act the overwhelming feeling for long periods was one that could perhaps be labelled anxiety. It was interesting to think about how this was achieved; the act moves away from the more narrative bent of the first 40 minutes, to take a more abstract approach as the dancers become not characters but ‘players’ in a game, often almost interchangeable. The soundtrack intensifies and relies more heavily on electronics, the movements become faster and more jerky to convey, unspoken, the rising authoritarianism and chaos of a fracturing society. I was entirely transfixed, and could almost feel my heart rate rising in response.

Similarly, I reflected on a film I’d seen with friends the weekend before: Small Things Like These, an adaptation of a Claire Keegan novella, starring Cillian Murphy. Murphy’s character, the gentle Bill, finds his encounter with a young woman in the local Magdalene Laundry stirs memories of his own childhood and of his mother. The novel, which is an extraordinary work of art, seems quiet and reflective, as the reader is cocooned within the slow pace of Joe’s gentle narration. In the film, Joe’s caring nature still shines through, but I left with a much stronger sense of his anguish, his worry – one might say his anxiety. Again, the word is entirely unspoken, rather Cillian Murphy makes extraordinary use of his physicality, of his hunched shoulders as the Mother Superior bullies him into silence, of his wide open eyes in the middle of the night as he lies awake beside his wife unable to find rest or relief.

These are all instances where art made use of a language beyond words to convey a sensation that can be hard to pin down. From colour, to body, to sound – anxiety could spread unspoken from these works of art to my own body, my own mind. Perhaps anxiety’s very strength lies in the difficulty we find in pinning it down, in saying for certain what it is or is not, or knowing for certain where it is.

There comes a time when every research must wonder if her research has swallowed her up and become the only lens through which she sees the world. Am I bringing my own anxiety to these works of art? I rather think not. For me at least, to echo a seasonally-appropriate phrase, anxiety actually is all around.