This Artist Confronts Her OCD And Scrupulosity Through Creation

Camilla Stark is an artist, designer, and member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). She also lives with scrupulosity, a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that includes religious or moral obsessions, causing individuals to experience immense guilt and fear that their thoughts and behaviors might violate a religious or moral doctrine. This condition is also common across various religions and among people who don’t practice religion.

Stark developed scrupulosity in high school, causing her to experience illness and anxiety, which she believed was because she did something wrong and needed to repent her sins. She shares with the Salt Lake Tribune that she stopped listening to music or reading books for fear of doing something wrong or offensive to her religion.

But now, she uses art as a way to process and heal.

Stark is a co-founder of an art collective called The ARCH-HIVE, which explores the complexities of Utah, Mormonism, and the American West, aiming to create a space for those who don’t quite “feel at home in either orthodoxy or secularism.”

In December 2022, ARCH-HIVE hosted an exhibit in Provo, Utah, where over 25 artists created works that depict their stories as LDS members with OCD. Though, over 70 people responded to the collective’s call for artists.

“For so long I thought I was the only one,” Stark tells the Salt Lake Tribune.

She certainly isn’t. Pieces on display at the exhibition included photographs depicting the compulsion to sing hymns as a way to quiet intrusive thoughts, and a collage using pages from the Mormon Doctrine. One of Stark’s most popular works is an ink drawing of a skull that reads, “well then, I’ll go to hell.” Folks have even gotten the design tattooed.

Stark is still a member of the church, though she shares the complex nature of her relationship with religion on her Instagram and in her work, creating space for others’