Ghanaian Artist Uses Spreadsheet to Illustrate his Mood Disorder

One day, when struggling to get to grips with a spreadsheet to calculate his annual budget for art supplies, an idea popped into the mind of Ghanaian visual artist Joseph Awuah-Darko. He could use the database to track his bipolar disorder, a mental illness that causes huge swings in a person’s moods, energy and concentration levels. The 28-year-old started allocating to every hour a colour that represented how he was feeling at that point in time – with red being the most depressive state, and pastel blue the most positive. His first UK solo exhibition, How’s Your Day Going?, “showcases his struggles with bipolar disorder, with which he was diagnosed at the age of 16 when he had a breakdown at school. The first painting Awuah-Darko created in the ‘How’s Your Day Going?’ series is entitled June 15 PM. The image holds particular “emotional gravitas” for the artist because he says it is when he accepted that his life was going to be based for the foreseeable future in Brussels – not Accra, Ghana’s capital.

BBC