The artist writes:

The series ‘Healing as performance’ was created while attending the SVA Performing at home course, where I was able to refocus on my practice. I spent the last few years with chronic fatigue and unsolvable mysterious illnesses that resulted in a series of doctors who distrusted my own account of my body and my experience. My new works explore my journey back to health and myself, as I deal with the aftermath of trauma and a disconnection to my own body. They are also a response to the female experience within a patriarchal society and its systems where women are not trusted with their own bodies and experiences, creating serious rifts in self-trust and self-knowledge. My journey through the health care system made me learn first hand how female autonomy is still considered hysteria. The works in this series ‘Healing as performance’ is a critique of society’s hierarchical power and knowledge structures, putting fourth artistic research as an alternative and performative production of knowledge. But most of all, I hope the works translate the idea that Illness, tragedy, and trauma are the birthplace of enlightenment.

My works are transcendental journeys into wavering opposing extremes. Using my own body as a cathartic material and tool, I’m interested in activating the female form as both artist and subject, contrasting the historical role of women as only an art object, while further exploiting the taboos that inhabit that space. I seek to break down border’s around taboos and subjectivity, bringing awareness to the illusion created by society to define normality and reality. Playing within art/life, beauty/abject, documentary/fiction, while exposing the realm of the intimate, I ask viewers to discover something more primal and true within and without. This new work acts as responses to my scientific and personal search for answers to my illnesses that ultimately led me to realize only I could heal myself. Melding somatic therapy, shamanism, energy medicine, filmmaking and cathartic body art, the works are a documentation of my personal healing process that explore the interrelationship between magic, science, religion, performance, and self discovery. I use intensive research into these subjects paired with my own experience to create work that seeks to ask many questions rather than give answers.

Students Share their Creativity at SVACE