Healing Out Loud
Healing Out Loud is a black and white self-portraiture photography series that challenges the stigma around mental health and neurodivergence. It began where most things begin for me with something I couldn't keep carrying like the grief and the stigma I experience and sometimes create within myself. I turned the camera on myself and started making something out of it and somewhere in that process, I discovered that the making itself was part of my healing.
My approach is based in therapeutic photography techniques and self-portraiture. Each image begins with a feeling I am sitting with and the act of creating it is part of how I move through it, so the photograph is both the process and the outcome. My work is intuitive as I follow what the moment is asking of me and let the image reveal itself rather than forcing it into shape.

This work was never only mine. Every artwork is also for the person who has felt that same door close and for anyone still trying to make sense of their own mind, navigating a world that accommodates them in theory but not always in practice. The stigma I am processing here is not unique to me because it is shared, and reinforced every time we mistake a policy for genuine inclusion. Healing Out Loud asks something of the people who stand in front of it. What does it really mean to include someone? I want this space to be a conversation opener and an invitation for everyone who has ever felt unseen, and for everyone who wants to do better by them.


Bianca Joanna Buliga is a finalist in the Don Dunstan Foundation Award for work in this exhibition.