Hell

Sartre famously said in his 1944 play No Exit that, “hell is other people.” By contrast, C.S. Lewis declared in The Great Divorce, “All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell”. In this drawing made with ink on paper, I am depicting a layered x-ray of my own head. The implication is that both my experience of my own choices and my understanding of other people are creations of my senses and cognition. That is, they are a manifestation of my mind. By depicting a visual representation of my skull and brain layered over itself, turned both left and right, and stretched into an unnatural form, I suggest that even what I understand to be factual is suspect, or at least distorted. In the end, we each have the potential to be hellish to each other – and to ourselves.