“He’s crazy”, we often say or hear it that treats people who break out of our awareness of the norm, whether it’s behavior, appearance, or way of thinking. But how the norm comes? Who sets it?

Over the life, a person’s mental health can be subject to various fluctuations and being in a certain balance between a normative and non-normative state. The problem of norm-sdandard is the problem of choice of a normative group —  people whose life activity acts as a standard by which the effectiveness of the level of functioning of the body and the individual is measured. Depending on who the authorities include into the regulatory group, different limits of the norm are established. The ideal norm acts as a means of simplifying and unifying the manifestations of personality. Thus, the concept of the norm includes an evaluative, prescriptive component: a person should be like this, not another. And everything that does not correspond to the ideal is declared abnormal.

Multidisciplinary artist Evgenia Makarova builds her practice around the complexities and issues surrounding mental health, personality disorders and opens debate about what ‘consciousness’ means. Her Abnormal project is dedicated to the problems of personality anomalies that arise when a person’s emotional sphere is suppressed.

In the Abnormal project, she revolves around painting and sculpture. This work directly references boundaries between our physical and cognitive states. Artist seeks to communicate ideas for which words are inadequate. She relies on an arrangement of colour and form, clever use of materials and substrates to conjure hitherto unacknowledged emotions and resonances. Makarova is experimenting with the mediums and stretching its limits.

“In my work, I want to show how society treats people with various personality disorders, to expose their fears. Ultimately for most of us, everything related to a person’s mental health is intimidating and incomprehensible, it is shunned and feared. I try to convey a sense of the strangeness of what is going on, fear and alienation, emotional tension.” Evgenia says.

In all countries arranged a treatment for schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and other major mental illnesses. However, the perception and even the course of these diseases depends on the norms of culture or society. As a rule, there is a social inequality in relation to normal and abnormal people. The artist want to draw the public’s attention to this problem. After all, there is no clear and understandable division line between psychopathology and the norm. This separation, as well as the degree of deviation of the phenomena of a person’s mental life, always varies depending on external conditions: time and socio-cultural factors.

The pandemic will change the boundaries of the state of mental health and normality of the individual. And if the norm becomes less and less, then the very concept of “norm” should be revised.