this unexpected experiment
What to say about this new work?
Collage created post-concussion, working in a sketchbook, making abstract organic shapes from paper scraps. Hiding in my office, making work in a sketchbook because there was an irritated disconnect between my observations, my emotions, and my actions. There was a terrible distance between my tedious explanations and what was understood.
The work about my brain that is not about my brain.
In July 2021, I bumped my head and had no idea how it would change my life.
Three months later I was angry, frustrated and helpless. I could not understand what was happening to me. I knew I was injured and struggling. I spoke carefully, slowly, thoughtfully but my words sounded flippant, terse. I obsessed about how to say things, how to speak. But the harder I worked on communication, the less I seemed to be understood.
All of this, I realized a few months later, were symptoms of my concussion and reactions to those symptoms.
But that autumn, as it got colder and darker, I felt confused and cornered. I could not go to work, I was tired headachey, irritable. Noises and light crashed over my senses. I was thirsty for silence, for visual quiet.
I spent a lot of time in my office--a vintage trailer parked in our driveway. I was afraid of sounding angry, afraid of causing arguments, afraid of my own reactions. I was too tired to go to my studio. Impairments in visual processing made riding my bike difficult and driving dangerous. Working in my office meant I could be separate but close by.
Collage became part of my regular creative practice around 2018. By the time I was struggling with PSC symptoms, it was not unusual for me to collage, or collage alone. I started working on my sketchbook because a friend, Kellette, shared her sketchbook and I loved the idea, containing all my work in one place, treating them like experiments.
When I decided to offer new prints for the holidays, I flipped through the sketchbooks, realizing I had a new body of work and a new way of working. But what struck me is that the shift in my work came post-concussion.
So many things shifted post-concussion it is difficult to differentiate cause or effect. The past few years have been of great shifts, extreme social shifts, personal shifts. I cannot claim that any one thing could shift my work. And yet, here we are. Sketchbook number one.
This work is from the first sketchbook I started, in the dark dark days before solstice , as the days got shorter and the nights longer, and I was so deep inside my muddled brain, I could not tell you how I really felt about anything. I did not trust my senses, my gut or my emotions.
Somehow, with all this darkness, I worked with bright colors, I tried incorporating people, there are snippets of joy and whimsy.
I am sharing them with you.
You can see the full collection here.
And buy prints here.
And if you want to know a little more about how post-concussion syndrome affects people, I am finishing up a zine about it. You can pre-order Eulalia #4 here. Created with collage, then riso printed in two colors.
