Abstract
With my artwork, I portray complex experiences associated with chronic pain and disability. Through mixed-media experiments, exploratory surfaces, and bodily projections, my creative research attempts to make the ineffable approachable to viewers. Through my work, I challenge others to seek a more empathetic grasp of pain and garner a more layered, empathetic understanding of someone else’s struggles within their own body. In my practice I expand on the experience of a life with pain: the attempts to find answers, the emotions of not finding them, the daily schedules negotiated to sustain, and the various treatments tried to overcome it. Through the residue I objectify from my own life, I attempt to hold place for others experiencing the invisible or hard-to-explain and work to confront medical institutions that may downplay the impacts of our experiences. By showcasing vulnerable moments, encapsulated struggles, through lines from past to present, and the layered weight of bodily experience, others are welcome to connect their own stories and through this exchange, I hope some can find their own healing.