How Do You Hold Water? Print

These small drawings, created with pen on paper, reflect a process of layering images from my surroundings. I intentionally work without a plan because this allows memories and dynamics that exist below my conscious awareness to become articulated on the page. Drawing is a habit, almost a compulsion, that comes from my childhood. It allows me to process aspects of my reality that have no words or can’t easily be put into words. The continued practice of drawing allows me to access childlike states of being and translate the emotional realities of my past selves onto the page. Many of these works reflect the felt experience of dissociated memories flooding back in the form of images with no words, or body sensations that can’t easily be named. The people in these drawings often have their mouths open and look like they are in a state of shock. I drew people this way because that was how to felt in those years. Bodies also became articulated in the way I perceived my own - disconnected and in parts, limbs floating off into the ether, objects disrupting the presence of the figure as if assaulting the body. The vessels feel as though they represent a human body - disrupted and drawn in disparate parts, never drawn completely whole. As I create the work, my hands translate my body memories onto the page. I think of this as a spiritual practice that allows me to heal parts of myself that left my body and still exist outside linear time. I think of myself as a witch or a shaman healing younger parts of myself that got lost in the spirit world. I am influenced by astrology, witchcraft, and books I have read about the impact of trauma on the body. Books like The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk and My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem influenced the way I understand the relationship between my body, my art, and traumatic memory. I hope that my work will communicate something about the way trauma influences a person’s sensory relationship the the physical world, past memories, and other people.