“I thought it would be so embarrassing if I fainted right now – or dropped dead,as I later learned. So I soldiered through it,I went home,I went to sleep,I was fine. I got up the next day and went to the studio.”
Then came the call:a halter device that had been monitoring her heart following ongoing episodes of discomfort had recorded 200 beats per minute – twice the average range of 60 to 100 beats for women. She needed to go to the hospital immediately.
There,after many tests,an electro-cardiologist explained that she had what is colloquially called “broken-heart syndrome”,a well-documented affliction brought on by emotional distress. The experience and diagnosis has led to her new animated work,Unnerved (2021),showing at Federation Square as part of festival.
Anita Glesta’s Unnerved explores the grief that followed the death of her father,Joel.Courtesy of the artist
The Christmas party,in 2017,wasn’t long after her father’s sudden death,and a grief-stricken Glesta had spontaneously returned to something she hadn’t done for 30 years:oil painting.
“It was an oil painting of a giant heart,a big,gooey heart,” says Glesta,who is known for large-scale public artworks that explore our shared humanity and,more recently,neuroscience. Much of her work is outdoors and digital – so she’s not an artist associated with sitting at an easel.
“For decades I’ve been a multimedia artist,and oil painting is something that I literally did leave behind,” she says via Zoom from her New York home. “But I had this visceral need to do something really oleaginous and in your face.” She was unmoored by grief,as she puts it,and painting helped to navigate the unknown. The heart began to manifest on the canvas,layered and expressive with warm,pink-red tones.
It was around that time that regular heart discomfort began,and she was urged to see a doctor. “Coming from a doctor’s family[her father was an endocrinologist],that is the last thing we ever do,” she says. A cardiologist put her on the halter device,connected to a cell phone that would relay results to HQ – as happened later at that Christmas party.
Two recent books – Annie Lord’sNotes on Heartbreak and Florence Williams’Heartbreak:A Personal and Scientific Journey – explore the issue in various ways but ground it in science.
Harvard Medical School defines broken-heart syndrome (also known as stress cardiomyopathy or takotsubo syndrome) as a rapid weakening of the heart muscle when someone experiences severe emotional or physical stress.
Anita Glesta’s Unnerved,ink on vellum,2022.Courtesy of the artist
“It set me in this new realm of thought which is that we have this whole universe inside of us,” Glesta says. “We are like cars,we put our foot on the pedal without knowing about the mechanics and the engine. And then something goes wrong,we open the hood and it’s like,wow,complicated! Can a mechanic fix this? Because I certainly don’t know how.”
While her condition has since resolved,Glesta’s interest deepened while she was working as a Laureate fellow at the University of New South Wales’ (fEEL) where she focused on the vagus nerve system. The vagus nerve runs from the cranium through the chest to the abdomen and is responsible for all sorts of involuntary and crucial functions such as breathing and digestion;but it also interfaces with our moods and mental health.
Unnerved began to evolve and she wrote an essay for the bookThe Big Anxiety:Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis,edited by Professor Jill Bennett,director of the fEEL lab and co-director of The Big Anxiety festival (with RMIT University’s Professor Renata Kokanovic).
“I am not only interested in the vagus nerve,but the mysterious universe of our hormones,how it is responsible for every drop of our humanity,” Glesta says. “It is an interesting irony that my father was an endocrinologist and we never discussed this. Yet I realise,after so much of my research,how much this aspect of being human is responsible for everything from our skin to our neurology. Sometimes I think that my dad is channelling me and that makes me happy and,of course,sad because I wish I could talk about this with him.”
Stills from Unnerved (details).Anita Glesta
At the ACMI atrium at Federation Square,the video-based work will be on a loop. Glesta has continued painting (but not in oils) and her evocative work features in the animated sequences that compriseUnnerved. Viewers are likely to be mesmerised by the experience,with the audio component serenading the imagery of internal bodily components such as neurons and the cardio-vascular system.
“My particular interest is more the physiological,the neuroscience,the enigma about what researchers seem to be learning about the trajectory of the brain to the gut and the heart,” she says. “There are many gaps in knowledge and a lot of them have to do with the very fine-line distinction between what is inherited and how our bodies respond to this. I am not a doctor,so my role in all of this as an artist has been,and is,to surface these issues through creating a visual language.”
ForUnnerved,that visual language is exquisite:hand-painted ink and watercolours transformed into stop-motion animation,alongside borrowed and altered medical imagery (such as the neurons),all set to an analogue audio track Glesta composed and recorded with her assistant.
“Animation is a new medium for me. In the last few years,apart from that moment of oil painting,I have been returning to working in ink,which as a little girl I did a lot of,and to watercolour. It made sense,given my interest in the body – the fluidity of it,the colour. I was able to turn realistic images into something more painterly. And then I had an ‘aha!’ moment:why not make that paint actually move? So,I taught myself animation in the most simple,baby way.”
Glesta says her social-activist side embraces working in public spaces,which allows a diverse demographic to access the experience.
As part of her research,she hopes to be present during the festival to hand out questionnaires exploring how visual art can help us understand our anxieties.
“Artists have traditionally had a fascination for painting the body in space and with light,volume and line – and,for me,there is a wealth of resources here with our internal systems.”
Unnerved is at Federation Square,September 24-October 8. The Big Anxiety festival runs September 21-October 15.
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