Violet: Why do you think that mental health is under discussed amongst men?
Sophia: It’s important to emphasise the scale of the male suicide problem, but not to forget that this is one among many mental health crises. In the trans teen population, suicide rates are astronomically higher than within men, but considering the amount of men making up the world population, it is such a serious issue. The fact is that men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women, and that suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45.

Men are socially conditioned not to talk about their problems, this is something that I have seen in my close family and with many of my male friends. There’s a battle where men try not to talk about what is affecting them in terms of their mental health, and the danger with that is when it gets to a point where the resolve to be ‘strong’ snaps, letting out feelings in ways that are out of control.

Violet: What kind of responses did you get from artists approaching the subject?
Sophia: An overwhelmingly high number of artists have responded by talking about family experiences of suicide. The number of people who feel this is something that directly affects their lives has been way bigger than I expected. Some pieces stand out for their unflinching honesty: Alice Aedy’s portrait of her brother, who has battled depression for several years, and Mat Kemp’s installation focusing on the benches he sat on with his brother as he fought cancer. And the introspection and self-critique in pieces by Wilson Oryema and Raf Fellner are exactly what we want to be showing. Chris Everton-Wallach has been one of the artists whose response has showed up the stereotypes most interestingly, since his struggle with physical health problems added a very personal element to the idea of strength and fragility.

Violet: What do you want the audience to take away after seeing the exhibition? Sophia: I hope that people will become aware of how thorny and difficult masculinity is and how insubstantial our conversations about it tend to be. Masculinity is obviously such a huge word and is touched on in so many ways but it has not inspired the level of serious thought and, most importantly, self-critique that femininity seems to have done. The word has negative associations which creates problems for men who feel trapped by mental health as they don’t know where to go to talk about this.

I hope viewers of the exhibition will see a picture of vulnerable men, who are interested in laying themselves bare – showing positive and negative, individual qualities and also how they fit in within wider structures, and also awareness of their privilege. I want the exhibition to help men talk about their systemic privilege but also be equipped to discuss the pressure these systems exert on their own lives. As we say in the brief, no man will ever live up to the masculine stereotype. Every man experiences patriarchal sexism, which cannot of course be equated to the experiences of women or people of non-binary gender, but it’s clear that the patriarchy fucks men as well. Hopefully the exhibition will help men have the framework to talk about their own mental health.

Fabergé Bowenite Charka with Jewelled Handle by Michael Perchin (c1896-1908) $222,382.44

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