Artist James Paddock began the journey of Mirrored to the Core inspired to create an installation, which then increasingly gathered collaborative energy into its current form, a 14-minute art video installation layering compositional filmic soundtrack, opera singing and location filming into a world where, rather than dwelling in the past or projecting into the future, we are invited to live in the moment.
Paddock's poetic artistic response is a true celebration of spontaneity and the leap of faith involved in falling in love as two people, through the other voices of their schizophrenic condition, create connection and surrender into Now. It relates to Prof Ann Kring, University of California, Berkeley’s research on schizophrenia and emotions, in the heightening of experience, that heightened experience of communication within the mind and between each other’s minds transforming the banality of a moment into opera as lived experience.
Where the schizophrenic is often confronted with boundaries, this piece is a celebration of the flow of the subconscious, the agility of the mind in its capacities to communicate interpersonally but also creatively, a fertile space of fluidity rather than one met by barriers.
As the 'mirrored' of the title suggests, the piece resonates in doubleness’s, the characters, their encounter, their other voices represented aurally through operatic singers, opening the subconscious mind out to the audience, in their intimacy and presence. The piece invites us to explore the relationship between schizophrenia and the creative imagination, that creative impulse which enables surrender rather than the analytical organisation of mind. The impression it leaves is of the schizophrenic, not afflicted, but liberated.