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Holly Kirby
Melissa Tyndall
Nicole Byrne
Timothy Gerard

‘Ah sure he’ll be grand’. Are we protecting the male interior or compartmentalising it?

A visual commentary on the system of male mental health and the factors surrounding the issue. The drawer is an archival structure that represents the system which contains a system that is not functioning.

317 transparent envelopes for 317 male lives lost by suicide in 2019. The envelopes represent the fragility of mental health and how they often enclose private and confidential information that is not initially seen by others. Exploring the protection of information through materiality of an envelope and assorting them into a filing system.

The commonly used Irish phrase ‘ah sure he’ll be grand’ and it’s dismissive nature is incorporated subtly as a lining of the drawers to furthermore show the suppressive instigation of mental health. Two of the drawers are extracted from the structure and suspended from the ceiling to reflect the weightlessness of the issue.

“The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence”
– Erich Fromm