Failure to Thrive by Storm Septimus @ LEA15

A few days ago I had the opportunity to visit LEA15, where Storm Septimus has created the installation titled ‘Failure to Thrive.’

I wandered around taking photos, struck by the raw beauty of the build.

I must admit, I did not get the info card from the artist when I landed, so I just used the windlight of the sim.

I was engrossed in taking pics and playing around with the various filters now available for snapshots.

However, there were several points where I was taken aback by the dark turn the build had taken.

The beautiful birds have been pierced by scissors.

I was concentrating on the cute dolls in the cage.

After taking the photo, I was unnerved by the red glare of the doll in the background.

Then I realized what the ‘tea party’ actually was.

Notice the fork stuck in the back of this hapless doll.

After my first wander-through, I went searching for an explanation or some insight into the artist’s thought process.

According to the artist, “If I were to use one word to sum it all up, well that’s easy, its simply about depression. I have been fighting with depression for almost as long as I can remember. Though I think it would take an idiot not to see that with the style of builds I install within SL. I find it very easy to indulge that side of me, and the results are usually bleak yet rather beautiful.  Originally the sim was to be just called The Gray Child as that was the title of my self indulgent mini ramble on a particularly woeful day. []In later thoughts I realised that’s what depression is … it is a failure to thrive .. emotionally.”  (via LEA blog)

After reading the explanation, I visited the build again, this time paying more attention to some of the underlying pieces I had missed or passed over on the first exploration.

Underneath the ‘tea party,’ I found strange creatures holding up the building.

A creature like this is surely the stuff of nightmares.

Or this one.

The build is certainly much darker than it originally appeared.

Discussing the build, Storm also said, “Alot (sic) of it looks perfectly acceptable from a distance… then when you get closer less desirable things come into focus. Agin a classic thing with people who suffer depression , on the outside we can quite easily appear like we are doing okay , get closer you see the cracks.” ( via LEA blog)

I took many more pictures than I can show here, so head on over to my KoinUp page to see additional (raw) photos.

I think I took somewhere around 50 photos, playing around with various filters and effects.

I highly recommend taking some time to wander around the build – it was definitely time well spent.