Art & mental health; Sanctus x WeTransfer

It’s hard to talk about mental health.

Sometimes words can’t say what we really feel.

Sometimes art or an expression of creativity can say more than we could possibly speak.

A few months ago we started working with WeTransfer and an artist from the Sanctus community called Jonathan G Ernesto.

We wanted to depict what a Sanctus mental health gym would look like in a piece of art.

We quickly realised that we couldn’t condense what Sanctus was all about into the rigid form of a building.

We couldn’t squeeze the mental health movement, the mission and the community into a piece of architecture.

Any piece of art is an expression of the self in some way and when it’s around mental health, the artist brings a lot of themselves to the canvas.

Between us, we soon realised that this piece was more about Jonny and his relationship with his mental health and how that would echo through the sketch.

So initially he sketched one person; the swirling darkness of their mental health or past traumas, moving towards the expansive universe of the self and finally to the clarity we can all find. Jonny’s first piece was like a depiction of one person’s journey with their own mental health.

A depiction of his.

Yet, something felt missing. The piece missed something so crucial in mental health; human contact, connection and community.

The final version includes two people experiencing that connection. Creating that space between them, that space where you can be open, honest and vulnerable.

You can see space in them too, literally, the details of their bodies showing how vast, complex and marvellous we all are.

The final piece is so brilliantly detailed, yet so simple too. Two humans truly connecting and creating that safe space between them.

That space is Sanctus.

It might not look like a mental health gym, but that space, that orb of pure light that connects the two beings; that’s Sanctus.

That’s what we believe a mental health gym looks like, a safe space for you and others to connect to who you really are.

Thanks Jonny, Scott and WeTransfer for creating this piece and sharing this with the world.