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.