Stress is a monster that eats Darryl Sinclair alive
When you “step” into the virtual Lightbox Studio at Arts Commons, you will notice a large shape greeting you at the door and oversized fabric limbs hanging from the walls of the studio. Soon Darryl Sinclair, multidisciplinary artist, designer, and current resident artist at the Lightbox Studio, will turn that giant shape into a stuffed monster – one that doesn’t feed on typical monster fare, but the messages of stress and anxiety from visitors like you. It’s all part of Darryl’s project Stress is a Monster that Eats me Alive.
Darryl Sinclair is a Calgary-born and raised artist. As an artist, Darryl works two-dimensionally with pen and paper, often illustrating self-caricatures of themself with humorous and mundane thoughts. Three-dimensionally, Darryl works with fiber, creating playful objects such as Stress Eaters, a project that has been in the works since 2016.
The project began to take root shortly after their brother passed away. Darryl began to see a counsellor and was advised to write their feelings down as part of the healing process. The practice of letting go of thoughts was key for them in managing their stress and anxiety.
“It externalizes it so you don't have to hold onto it so much anymore, because a lot of stressful things can clog our minds. I know it's not healthy to ignore those things either, so I think writing it down is a good way of acknowledging the stress or hurt, or grief, or whatever you're going through. It is a good way of just acknowledging it, but also putting it somewhere so that it doesn't need to take up space in your brain anymore, even if it's just for a moment,” they said.
Darryl grew up in a family of artists that encouraged their art every step of the way; so, it’s not unexpected that creativity would be incorporated into their process of healing from loss. The Stress Eater’s form came when Darryl spotted pencil cases that were animal-shaped as they were walking through a mall, immediately sparking thoughts of turning them into a receptacle for thoughts and to implement it as an aspect of the exercise of articulating their stress, anxiety, and grief.
“Putting my thoughts inside something to gobble it up is just a fun way to further externalize it [my feelings]. Writing it down makes it still real, but then it being eaten makes you not have to think about that right now. It's real and it still exists, but it exists in the belly of a monster.”
Stress Eaters is a fiber-based project in which Darryl builds stuffed animals with mouth pockets that connect the artist back to their childhood. It is interactive and playful, and each of the objects is hiding within them the artist’s feelings and inner thoughts. As part of their residency at the Lightbox Studio, Darryl is now taking the project one step further and building a giant fleece Stress Eater: 10 times bigger than the ones they’ve built in the past—standing approximately seven feet tall—and big enough to crawl within its mouth and be eaten by it. As part of the project, Darryl is asking people to send in their thoughts of stress via a form found here, so they can incorporate your submissions to the final piece.
In order to bring the project to life, Darryl has had to combine their creative brain with their technical knowledge. Darryl will draw on both their education in design and their current work in a boutique design firm in Calgary to help bring these two sides of the project together. Currently, Darryl is working on the project at home part-time and at the Lightbox Studio when possible and will eventually conclude by stuffing it with thoughts of anxiety submitted by the community in addition to their own body as a way to embrace the stress and worries of their daily life. “My anxiety is always going to be a part of my life. It's going to be ever present like any sort of illness. It never goes away fully.”
In these extra stressful times, Darryl is clear that anxiety is always present and is something they are learning to live with and channel through their artistic practice. “Maybe writing notes for me is not enough, I just need to be eaten because I am anxiety and it’s a part of me and a part of who I am,” they say.
Darryl wants people to know it is a normal emotion and not in the least shameful. They recognize that the world is experiencing a collective sense of worry, uncertainty, and—for some—despair, but amongst it all is an opportunity to de-stigmatize mental illness and bring awareness to mental health:
“A lot of my family suffers from mental health issues. Most of my friends have mental health issues and I think it is something that is really important to talk about. I think it's getting a lot better recently, but there's definitely still a little bit of that stigma and people just don't like to talk about hard things, so I try to make it easier with my drawings or by creating a project like Stress Eaters,” they say.
After gathering the submissions and writing them on paper, Darryl will stuff the giant Stress Eater with everyone’s messages and then, in a performance element to the project, Darryl will also be eaten by the monster themselves. Audiences can follow the process by visiting the 3D Virtual Tour of the Lightbox Studio on the Arts Commons website under Visual and Media Arts as well as in Darryl’s Instagram page.
