For the month of August, Holy Rollers has hosted Psychache, an exhibition curated by Ray Harris and Adele Sliuzas that dwells on themes of “distress or discomfort due to disenchanted or unsatisfied psychological needs.

Ray came across the term – coined by psychologist Edwin Schneidman – during her masters, and has sat with her in the years since.

“I always look at psychological conditions of basically being a person, and the difficulties of that. So for my masters I was looking at love and hate and suicide, and fantasies to do with that, and escape, and this term ‘psychache’ came up,” she says.

“It’s basically… this unbearable psychological pain that can’t be solved.”

To help bring the term into a material form, Ray and Adele have brought together 16 artists to provide work that explores the theme.

“We just sat down and started talking about artists that we know and that we thought fit in with that sort of theme,” Ray says.

“We weren’t being overly prescriptive, all their work deals with a similar thing, but Jenna Pippett, her work often has to do with her family being migrants and this whole history she has because they came from somewhere else. So it’s a way to look at that theme in a much broader sense.

“Julia [Robinson]’s work, it’s moved onwards to a different thing, but she revisited old work that’s looking at death and how people in our society relate with death and dying. So there are different interpretations.

“Importantly, I got funding again from Arts SA, but what most of that goes to is just paying the artists. I think it’s really important to give artists another opportunity to get paid for their work.”

Psychache culminates this Saturday with a live performance night, which will see eight separate performances occurring within the Holy Rollers space.

“There’s some that will go the whole time, they’re durational, and others are a set performance for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And all the work will still be in here, so people will be responding in between the work,” Ray says.

“We did it last year as well, that was the first time we did this thing of an exhibition with a performance night at the end, and it was great. Everyone loved it.”