Body of Work is a multi-media exhibition examining the impact of chronic illness, invisible disability, and the body as both testament and vessel for transformation.

For years, my work has been a life saving measure emerging from chronic and dynamic illness—mental, neurological, and physical. Last October, a freak accident and a traumatic brain injury altered my life permanently. This exhibition includes pieces created in the immediate aftermath of that injury and throughout ongoing neurological and vision rehabilitation. These works trace rupture, persistence, grief, and the Sisyphean labor of becoming again, and again, and again. Art alchemizes pain into poetry.

“What can a body do?
What can a mind do?
This brain, this anxious system, weighs nine pounds.
Nine pounds pounding the same question.

The mind soars.
The body cannot dispel gravity.
I trusted my hands to hold their tender armor.
I trusted I could let go.”

At the center of the exhibition is a full-scale replica of my body constructed from paper-mâché and illuminated from within. The surface is composed of my medical records, diagnostic imaging, bills, and fragments of past artwork. Feathers made of medical records and my own art form a plumage of tired persistence. The body glows with the history of its rupture. 

This piece functions simultaneously as diary, medical file, relic, and proof of life. I rebuilt my body, I filled it with light, I found where it needed support, I found where it needed help. I recorded the times it received it- and when the help hurt more. In transforming documentation into skin it renders the invisible visible.
This is what I carry.

BODY of WORK is an illuminated scar.

I am showing mine.

Will you show yours?