Putting a smile on your face

THE skies around Dublin city centre and Cavan Town will have some unusual visitors today.

Stuart Semple’s Happy Clouds are being released as part of First Fortnight, an annual arts-and-music festival that tackles mental illness prejudice.

Semple, who is one of Britain’s most gifted and original contemporary artists, was inspired to create Happy Clouds when the global recession hit in 2008. He thought that by springing 2,057 pink, smiley-faced clouds into the sky it might cheer up punters going about their day. He tried the stunt in London first — outside the Tate Modern — and, because it received such a warm response it has toured around the world to cities like Milan, Sydney, and now Ireland.

The clouds are made from helium, soap and vegetable dye. Semple modified the type of special-effects machine used in Hollywood to create snow on a movie set to fashion his rogue clouds. They last for about 30 minutes and have provoked some interesting reactions.

“There was a businessman walking across the Millennium Bridge in London,” says Semple. “He was obviously about to lose everything. He looked depressed, with a really screwed-up face. He had a briefcase and he was hustling along in the freezing cold when one of the big Happy Clouds almost took his head off. It flew right at the guy, and he looked right at it, and I just saw his face melt. He had this grin. It was brilliant. It completely transformed him.”

Semple had a troubling experience when he was 19 years of age, which transformed his life, and has informed the extensive work he does in fundraising and promoting awareness about mental illness. He is a global ambassador for Mind, the national association for mental health in the UK, and, for example, in 2011, he rounded Britain’s finest artists, including Tracy Emin and the Chapman brothers, for participation in Mindful, an exhibition and charity auction, hosted by Stephen Fry and Melvyn Bragg.

“I was coming back from London to visit my family, and I must have eaten something I was allergic to, and ended up in hospital. The normal medication that is used for an allergy didn’t really work. One night they put this plasma through me in a drip, which they thought would help me, and I was actually allergic to that. I died for a few seconds. I came back. I survived but I was left with an incredible phobia of eating anything, obviously — I didn’t know if it would happen again. I developed quite a bad anxiety disorder following that.

“Before the incident I thought I was indestructible. I never broke a bone; never broke a leg. I’d no fear of anything. Then out of the blue this happened to me, and it just knocked me for six. It took me many years to deal with it. I still have panic attacks even now. They tend to be situational. I can have six months when nothing happens, and then I can have a very anxious couple of months.”

Since the near-death experience, Semple has had a prolific output. He began selling his work on eBay. Each night, he used to auction off three pieces of artwork, starting the bidding at £1 each, which led to a cult following. Today his work is housed in the likes of the Getty collection, while some of it gets aired publicly under the banner of typically witty exhibition titles, such as It’s Hard to Be a Saint in This City, and Everything Lasting Nothing Less; his use of language in his pop art is a nod to his love of wry music lyrics.

A self-portrait entitled A Pounding Outside Poundland is particularly eye-catching. In it, a thug in a skeleton outfit and mask smacks Semple, pow!-style, outside one of the pound-shop stores. It’s based on an assault he suffered when he was 17 years of age.

“In this painting, I’m trying to deal with this moment of impact,” he says. “This idea that everything could be alright, and then out of nowhere something happens and your whole life can change. I’m actually — through that picture — dealing with this allergy incident, and the near-death experience in the hospital. It personified it.”

Semple spoke at last year’s First Fortnight festival with the filmmaker and Emmy Award-winning actor Joey Pantoliano (Ralphie in The Sopranos) in a session called Please Can You Make Some Noise For … Mental Health. Semple identifies stigma as “the block in the road” in dealing with mental health in society.

“It’s ridiculous that we have stigma around mental illness. If you have a cold or you’re ill you ring up your boss at work and say, ‘Ah, I’m not feeling very well today,’ and you get the day off. You can’t ring up and say, ‘I’m really depressed’, or ‘I had a really bad panic attack this morning’. You’d feel that you have to cover it up.

“If we could express how we feel, and support each other more, then that’s the answer. I find when I’m trying to cover up an anxious moment — it just makes it worse because I’m keeping it in. When I share it, it really takes the edge off it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with us as a society where we’re so prejudiced against people who suffer a mental health issue. It happens to one in four people in any given year so it affects all of us at some point.”

* Stuart Semple’s Happy Clouds will be released at the following venues as part of the First Fortnight Festival: Grafton St, Dublin (1pm, today); People’s Park, Dún Laoghaire (12pm, Jan 3); North Earl St, Dublin (12pm, Jan 4); CHQ, Dublin (12pm, Jan 6); Cavan Town Centre (12pm, Jan 7), Temple Bar, Dublin (12pm, Jan 11). Further information: www. firstfortnight.ie