The Body Keeps The Score

The origins of ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ are found in the ineffably compulsive condition of trauma and grief – the loss of Amma, my aunt. This sharply visceral space is shaped by a heady compulsion to remember and commemorate – processes that cannot be willed or learnt. Her belongings became invested with an urgent potential to preserve – they might be used to perform, even if only temporarily, acts against forgetting.

I’d been propelled into this fervent state from a protracted tunnel of smothered suffering – the muffled, institutionalised space of healthcare, where communication is circumscribed and language and interiors are anesthetised.

These works are born of dichotomy – the abundant expanse of anguish and the strictly delineated world of the medical facility. Two terrains that are unnavigable in opposing ways: one feverish with uncontrollable emotion, the other featureless and cold. Impossible to find equilibrium, each exists informed and obliterated by the other.

A longer shadow of remembering is also cast: my capacity to create is shaped by rituals inherited from my aunt. Suffering through Parkinson’s disease, I witnessed her pursue repetitive, habitual activities that offered a mechanism she could recognise, predict and control. She used knitting and sewing to forge routes of rigour that held her day-to-day together. The meditative and hypnotising experience of watching her make stirs in me as I sew, making a seam of my life to hers. In this, divergence is pinched together as memories are overlaid and sutured – it will now, forever onwards, also be redolent of the stitched wound across her heart, post cardiac surgery.

Ritualised acts became a scaffolding on which my aunt arranged each day. Here, they become a framework within which I map and synthesise the institutional and the personal, the clinical and the domestic, the past and the present.