All Sky, Mirror Ocean

All Sky, Mirror Ocean is for everyone looking to understand the complex issues around mental illness and healing. Combining autobiography, research-creation, poetry, and creative philosophy, Brad Necyk uses art and words to uncover and tell new stories about trauma and recovery. Necyk weaves his own histories with bipolar affective disorder and childhood medical trauma with those of other people dealing with grief and loss: head and neck cancer patients in Edmonton, psychiatric inpatients in Toronto, and communities in Iqaluit stricken by suicide. Punctuated with art, these lived experiences intertwine with scholarship on arts-based research, neuroscience, collaboration, and psychedelic altered states to reveal the understanding and acceptance that comes from acknowledging our deep connections-to ideas and emotions, to our environments, to art, and to each other. Showing great compassion and wisdom, All Sky, Mirror Ocean is a model for research-creation and artistic fieldwork. "Weaving elegantly-and alchemically-through anecdote, memory, vignette, and story, Brad's All Sky, Mirror Ocean models research-creation at its aesthetic and political best." Natalie Loveless, Foreword A research-creation project exploring artistic fieldwork, mental illness, and healing. Brad Necyk is a visual artist and writer whose practice focuses on mental illness, empathy, consciousness, and flourishing. He completed a research-creation PhD in Psychiatry and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. A research-creation project exploring artistic fieldwork, mental illness, and healing. 61 colour images, annotated bibliography, alternate table of contents, foreword "All Sky, Mirror Ocean is beautifully written, invitingly complex, heartbreakingly real. This visionary work is not so much a contribution as a live wire. It is unbearably important." Erin Manning, Concordia University



• Acknowledgements


• for sha : on writing


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• Introduction


• Alberta #3


• Iqaluit, Nunavut


• Telling Stories Otherwise


• Edmonton, Alberta


• No Trespassing


• Cancer


• A research meeting


• Being


• Healing


• World Gone Wrong


• 1987


• The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario


• Unwell


• Stories and Worlds


• Worlding


• The Open


• Morning Light


• Death #1


• A Dry City


• Spaciousness


• Knowing


• An Arts-Based Workshop


• The Abyss


• For Mom, For Dad


• The Origin of the Work of Art


• Visionary Art


• The Visionary Artist


• Distant Early Warning


• Self-Showing


• North Bay, Ontario


• Unthinkable Stories


• The Behaviour of Art


• Knowing Otherwise


• Creation-as-Research


• Co-Creating Cancer


• Waiting Room


• For my Grandma


• For Jesse


• For Ellie


• For Him


• For Mary


• The New Girl


• Co-Creation


• Default-Mode Network


• Entropic Brain


• Psilocybin


• For Derek and Luanna


• ECT


• A Sermon


• Psychiatric Rooms


• Music Room


• Into Mania


• For the young girl next to me, who is still with me


• Death #2


• Life


• For Candace


•








• Select Annotated Bibliography


• References


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• Alternative Tables of Content


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• Iqaluit


• Iqaluit, Nunavut


• No Trespassing


• Morning Light


• A Dry City


• An Arts-Based Workshop


•






• Cancer


• Edmonton, Alberta


• Cancer


• A Research Meeting


• Self-Showing


• Unthinkable Stories


• Co-creating Cancer


• Waiting Room


•






• Centre for Addiction and Mental Health


• The Centre for Addiction and Mental H