One day when struggling to get to grips with a spreadsheet to calculate his annual budget for art supplies, an idea popped into the mind of Ghanaian visual artist Joseph Awuah-Darko.
He could use the database to track his bipolar disorder, a mental illness that causes huge swings in a person's moods, energy and concentration levels. “I'm a visual learner and I thought: 'Why don't I use colour as a language?'” Awuah-Darko told the BBC.
"Colour allows me to express things that I can't really capture in words.”
The 28-year-old started allocating to every hour a colour that represented how he was feeling at that point in time - with red being the most depressive state, and pastel blue the most positive.
“It became something that became addictive - and cathartic. And an interesting way of monitoring my life.”
