Giulia: The artwork is a fully functional quilted blanket with a pattern of triangles that presents an optical play where figure and ground are interchangeable. Depending on the point of view the image can be read in different ways.

Anjali: A blue parallelogram within a row of blue parallelograms seems “normal”. Zoom out and the row of blue parallelograms, within a sea of triangles, suddenly becomes abnormal. Even in this simple world of shapes, normality is inextricable from context. 

Is mental illness merely a deviation from a “norm”? 

 The blanket itself is also a representation of relativity.  A Markov Blanket is a concept in statistics: the mathematics of uncertainty. It ‘wraps’ around an entity, separating it from its environment and thereby defining it. The Blanket provides a context for its individual elements, creating an overarching stability: like Theseus' ship, it remains itself in spite of the smaller ups and downs of its constituents. 

This is useful for understanding the perpetual dance between living things like the brain and the constantly changing outside world. Any interactions ‘through’ the Markov Blanket can only be second-hand, indirect. Where there is indirectness there is uncertainty and where there is uncertainty there is inference. The only reality we can know, then, is what we infer from the patterns and deviations we perceive.