SOMATAESTHESIA: EXPLORING THE INEXPRESSIBLE SENSATIONS OF CHRONIC ILLNESS THROUGH EXPANDED SPATIAL PRACTICE
Despite thousands of years of research into the human body, so much of it remains—or is kept—a mystery. As someone living with chronic illness, these mysteries define every moment of my adult life, shaping my perception of my body, psyche and relationship to the world, while remaining almost impossible to express in language.
Somataesthesia is an aesthetic exploration of chronic illness, sensory perception, and biomedical science, and an effort to give tangible form to invisible ailments that are often overlooked and severely under-researched. I draw on my lived experience of illnesses like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, endometriosis, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, replicating the visuals or felt sensations of symptoms like blood pooling, joint pain and brain fog. This collection of works collates the myriad tensions in representations and experiences of the body: between the abject and the beautiful, the internal and the external, the clinical and the personal, the abstract and the accurate.
My practice-led research integrates feminist care ethics, somaesthetics, and autoethnography with an intuitive making process and experimental, viscerally evocative materials, exploring the inherent abstraction of the body both aesthetically and experientially. The methods and mediums I use promote an embodied, healing, and sustainable practice, fostering a synergy between my art-making, self-care and treatment and sense of bodily autonomy.
Eugenie (they/she) is a multidisciplinary emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne with a focus on bodily phenomena. Their installation-based practice explores the hidden things we experience, and references psychophilosophy, mysticism, somaesthetics, and historical and contemporary discourse on afab bodies in medicine.
Website: https://eugeniegulliferlaurie.com/
