Creative outlet

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WHEN Liz Wickramasinghe is layering colour and experimenting with texture, it feels almost spiritual.

It is hard to explain, the Armstrong Creek artist says, as though she is in the right place at the right time.

“Making art has been like a form of treatment for me,” Liz says.

“It has boosted my sense of self-worth and strengthened my identity.

“I honestly believe my mental health is dependent on maintaining a balance in life where I prioritise making art regularly so that I can express my ideas creatively and overcome that yearning.”

Liz is a wife of an engineer, mother of two boys and art teacher.

She pinpoints her earliest experience with depression to 2003 after completing a tertiary design degree and having no job prospects at the end of it.

Negative thoughts and overwhelming feelings of helplessness have continued on and off throughout adulthood, some periods worse than others.

She says anxiety feels a bit like remembering you have left the iron on when you are at the shops.

This year Liz spoke to her doctor for the first time about what was going on in her head.

“I am not ashamed to say I’m now on medication, not like I thought I would be,” she says.

“It has had such a positive effect on me, I actually want to tell everyone. “I wish I took them earlier.” Liz has always felt lucky in life.

She grew up in Moonee Ponds with two younger sisters and describes her family as nurturing and encouraging.

“My parents were always very supportive of me and never over-pushed,” she says.

“I have always been someone who has had high expectations of myself, I push myself and I often feel overwhelmed by the tasks I set out for myself.

“I can be quite a perfectionist and a worrier but I’ve also had lots of anxietyfree, happy periods.”

As a “self-doubting 19-yearold”, Liz boldly packed up her things to work as a nanny in Italy and has since travelled extensively across Europe and Scandinavia, the US, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Japan and Fiji.

With two bachelor degrees and as many diplomas, the secondary teacher has worked in schools and at the National Gallery of Victoria.

As a volunteer, she has invested full-time hours into the Koorie Heritage Trust, Adult Migrant Education Services and remote Aboriginal communities.

“During my first period of depression in 2003 I read somewhere that volunteer work could be really helpful and saw it as an opportunity to escape some of my feelings of self-doubt,” she says.

“I chose to volunteer my time with some organisations I was passionate about and that could perhaps use my support.

“It was a great way to challenge myself and feel like I was part of a community of inspiring people, to feel useful and needed when I was at my lowest.”

Liz moved to Geelong in 2014 when she was pregnant with her second boy so the family could be closer to husband Shahan’s work.

Now aged 41, Liz says the important men in her life initiate conversations about mental health.

“The more we talk, the better we all feel,” she says.

“My dad is very open in discussing emotional wellbeing, which is always very encouraging.

“In my experience, being able to discuss with a partner where you’re at and when you’re not feeling great can also be very empowering.”

in the home studio, Liz’s painting and printmaking work is unintentionally autobiographical. Landscapes and botanical imagery are interwoven with geometric lines, form and pattern.

Intricate, controlled details are contrasted with freeflowing strokes of colour like the “complex intensity and tension” she feels when constricted by anxiety.

“I am not interested in depicting realism,” she says.

“Instead I abstract and rearrange imagery from memory, experience and reference material.

“I will often incorporate intuitive and expressionistic processes, splashing, dripping and scraping paint in an unplanned way.”

Liz credits her medication for becoming more “prolific and experimental” with her art. This year was also the first time she called herself an “artist” and a recent joint exhibition in Ceres somewhat validated the title.

She makes a conscious effort to practise creativity and says the benefits are evident in her role as mother to Lewis, 6, and Charlie, 4.

“Now that I’ve made art a priority in my life, I intend on