All Sky, Mirror Ocean is for everyone looking to understand the complex issues around mental illness and healing. Combining autobiography, research-creation, poetry, and creative philosophy, Brad Necyk uses art and words to uncover and tell new stories about trauma and recovery. Necyk weaves his own histories with bipolar affective disorder and childhood medical trauma with those of other people dealing with grief and loss: head and neck cancer patients in Edmonton, psychiatric inpatients in Toronto, and communities in Iqaluit stricken by suicide. Punctuated with art, these lived experiences intertwine with scholarship on arts-based research, neuroscience, collaboration, and psychedelic altered states to reveal the understanding and acceptance that comes from acknowledging our deep connections—to ideas and emotions, to our environments, to art, and to each other. Showing great compassion and wisdom, All Sky, Mirror Ocean is a model for research-creation and artistic fieldwork.

Brad Necyk is a visual artist and writer whose practice focuses on mental illness, empathy, consciousness, and flourishing. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. He lives near Victoria, BC.

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"All Sky, Mirror Ocean is beautifully written, invitingly complex, heartbreakingly real. This visionary work is not so much a contribution as a live wire. It is unbearably important." Erin Manning, Concordia University