Essay by Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie for Contextualising Practice
Pain
To experience ineffable pain, when it has no identifiable source and no external mark or visible causality, is almost like having hallucinated it. Pain, Elaine Scarry argues, is a form of suffering that resists language (1985); clinical vernacular (eight-out-of-ten stabbing in the deep lower left quadrant of the abdomen) neatens the gut-churning terror of a severe pain flare, while graphic similes (being fucked by a rusted hacksaw) are often unappreciated and lack the nuance of what Pellegrino calls the ‘ontological assault’ that is living with a chronic health condition (1979: 44). The ‘unshareability’, as Scarry calls it, of being chronically ill (a term I will use interchangeably with pain and suffering, as to me they are the same) is to inhabit a liminal space where one’s most profound struggles are simultaneously deepened and made almost obsolete by their inability to be experienced, perceived or accurately imagined by others (1985:4).
And yet, as Amy Elliott has argued, being able to share one’s predicament provides an essential role in enabling the ill person to ‘formulate their intersubjective meaning and experience of illness’ (1998:3) and regain a sense of identity, both as an individual and as part of a collective, that they have been stripped of. Arthur Kleinman, M.D. writes about the illness narrative (1988), a story created by the patient which not only functions as a medical autopathography but as an account of how illness becomes inseparably entangled with every facet of the sufferer’s existence until it is no longer an entity of its own, a ‘non-you’ (Sontag 1978:67), but is, as Kleinman has articulated ‘environed in a concrete life-world’ (1988:29). The illness narrative allows someone to formulate their history as a chronically ill person in a way that moves beyond their experience of symptoms, and instead communicates how these symptoms shape the way they move through the world; chronic illness, particularly when it involves persistent pain, is disruptive of all relationships to one’s environment, including to people, places, objects, to oneself, and even, as Good et al. assert, to time, which is warped and lost by pain (1994:42).
If pain is so resistant to language, how does one formulate an illness narrative around it that can be shared and engaged with?
Pain ± Object
Elaine Scarry argues that it is the ‘objectlessness’ (1985:162) and lack of tangible reference that prevents the experience of pain from being communicated, suggesting that, were the ‘felt-attributes’ (1985:13) of this pain transferred onto some external vehicle and thus objectified, they might be made accessible to audiences. The art object, then, the installation in particular, becomes an ideal medium for illness narratives to inhabit, as artists are able to express their personal histories of suffering in myriad ways, including literal re-presentations. Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) for example, is a relocation of the artist’s bed and its surroundings after a depressive episode which acts as an archive of the externalisation of the artist’s suffering onto her (and now the audience’s) environment, forming something akin to a figureless sickbed scene where the medical paraphernalia is replaced by that of sex and mental illness. There is also Eugenie Lee’s participatory project Seeing is Believing (2016-2019), which goes beyond Emin’s transposition of audience members to passive cohabitant of her environment. Seeing is Believing understands the audience’s ‘capacity for…being affected’, as Massumi has put it, (2002:15). It utilises external stimuli, like nausea-inducing frequencies from subwoofer speakers and VR encounters with pain-causing objects such as barbed wire, to replicate the visceral experience of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, surpassing ‘sympathetic co-suffering’ (Knudsen et al. 2012:155) and instead causing actual psychosomatic suffering . If these two works exist on a spectrum of installation-based illness narratives, with My Bed inviting audiences to view an archive of the sufferer’s lifeworld on one end and Seeing Is Believing causing audiences neuropathic pain on the other, I might say my work falls somewhere between in affective qualities, and on a more allegorical spectrum of aesthetics.
Fast/Slow We Holometabolise (2022) is a three-part mixed-media installation that combines diaristic practices, experimental materiality, symbolism and the study of Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) to ‘harness the forces’ (O’Sullivan 2001:125) of chronic illness and make them inhabitable by viewers. Holometabolism, I should note, is a complete metamorphosis, in which the insect essentially melts itself down into a biological stew and reforms itself with an entirely different body, similar to how ‘sickness can make us different persons while we remain the same person’ (Brody 1987:X).
Pain±Object±Moth
My exploration of moths started as a purely aesthetic practice after I discovered that, unlike the ugly and inexplicably ever-present pantry moth, some species are astonishingly beautiful. This ended up coinciding with a period of debilitating, traumatic and deeply overwhelming experiences of pain which I felt I had no means to express, and I found that by combining the two I had a symbolic conduit through which to communicate the psychological damage this pain was causing.
This may be due, in part, to the fact that the moth is a creature of Jungian semiotics, a signifier of the shadow self; out of the two branches of Lepidoptera, the crepuscular moth is the one ‘a person has no wish to be’ (Jung 1990:16). When you are in the throes of severe persistent pain, you have no choice but to engage with the darkest and most abject elements of your existence, the moth-self to your butterfly-self. In what Elliott calls the ‘liminal state’ inhabited by the chronically ill (1998 ), the separation of entities is destabilised––id, ego and shadow merge, distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness dissolves, body and mind become one in some ways and completely divorce in others, past and present knit together, and an entire life’s worth of pains, traumas, and suffering from all different sources coagulate into an omnipresent entity that yearns to be shared and transformed into what Hydén has articulated as a ‘collective phenomenon’ (1997:55).
By utilising the moth’s aesthetic and allegorical qualities, I felt able to communicate the most private and distressing subjects without feeling completely vulnerable or confrontational, and found that, by removing myself from the subject matter somewhat, the work could be interpreted less as a confessional or didactic narrative on suffering, but an immersive environment where viewers can viscerally and emotionally perceive the experience of illness and chronic pain.
Pain±Object±Moth±Art
The element of the installation that audiences first encounter is The Metamorphosis (see fig. 1), a cave-like structure built around an open doorway that allows the audience to peer inside, but not enter. Prior to even seeing the work, an echoing of indistinct fluttering sounds can be heard from Postmitotic, a film projection of moth shapes superimposed over blood droplets that melt together like a gothic primordial soup. The sounds are textural and almost tactile, and follow the audience around all three works. Small works on plastic etching plates sit on either side of the door like plaques or cave sigils, with paintings of moths, transparent copies from books on biology and historical medical practices, and etchings rubbed with red ink of text and drawings of insect wings, veins, Prometheus’ liver and its hungry eagle.
In between the sheer, somewhat tattered curtains that drape the entrance, a wounded-looking, human-ish soft-sculpture figure, the size of a large child, hovers above a draped plinth, dressed in frail fabrics, her drawn heart exposed, wire vulva with its trailing umbilical cord on display, disproportionate legs––one swollen, one atrophied––hanging, an old bed sheet flowing from her shoulders into the room behind like a veil or pair of limp wings. She is imposing, yet clearly weakened; drips of a blood-like substance stain her chest and the post between her legs matches the bloody spots on the fabrics that are draped around her space, and those in the video that is projected around the same area. Her site is a cocoon of mixed textiles; large hanging fabrics printed with motifs of moths, teeth, brains, and moth eggs, organs depicted by sequins and beads, torn tulle, a painted portrait on a large piece of fabric dotted with tiny dried seeds and shredded petals, all of the different fabrics layered haphazardly and linked together like a web. A piece of fabric on the ground extends slightly out of the doorway, barricading the audience from entering the installation fully––although they can poke their head through the door and look around at the insides of what is a symbolic endometriosis-ridden womb, they are blocked and therefore not a fully immersive experience like Lee’s Seeing Is Believing.
Many of the textiles in the installation are made from recycled bed sheets (bed is a place where I have had to spend much time in rest and a site of illness and trauma for many), and have coatings and drips of fluids and substances that are unidentifiable yet greatly resemble bodily fluids like menstrual blood, phlegm, semen or various discharges – but are actually liquid latex, pearlescent pigment, ink, and glue. All of the textiles have been painted on, embroidered, torn, burnt, bleached or dyed by hand, leaving a human trace and creating a sense of fragility and temporality, and many have been printed with small stamps of lepidopteran and anatomical motifs, each of which is multiplicitous, and appears throughout the entire body of work over and over again in obvious and minute details, creating a visual language that exists only in the world of the installation.
To the right of The Metamorphosis is a small, open room featuring two more elements; Pupa (fig. 3) and Altarpiece (fig. 2). The latter is, as the name suggests, an altar, constructed from three wooden panels overlaid with mosaiced glass, writing, collage, childhood photos, and soldered acetate moths reminiscent of stained glass forms. The altar sits a few feet from the back wall upon a wide plinth draped in a mix of printed and diaphanous fabrics. On the wall behind the altar is a series of miniature human hearts and brains cast in wax flanked by their latex moulds, empty and slightly torn. The top hearts and brains have dried petals mixed into the white wax to make them look dark and cankerous, the colour draining as the series descends down the wall. At the base of the altar sits a handcrafted book. The open centrefold of the book reveals a blatantly Bible-esque histogenesis of moths, folding out from the centre to a series of drawings, collages, photocopies of my medical records and treatment info sheets, and manic diaristic writings about moths, pain and illness (for, as Scarry (1985) and Good et al. (1994) assert, such pain resists common uses of language, and gives way to something far less coherent).
The three panels of the altar are each dedicated to a specific moth, which are themselves dedicated to different forms of suffering. On the central panel is a Luna moth (Actias Luna), wings outstretched like a crucified martyr, its companion on one side is a Spanish Moon Moth (Graellsia Isabellae), catching some sun from the window after much time in the dark, and on the other a Lime Hawk Moth, or (Mimas Tilae), whose light has gone out. The latin name of the latter is similar to the nickname of a close friend who passed away during the creation of Fast/Slow We Holometabolise, and whose simultaneously radiant spirit and ongoing struggles with mental health reminded me strongly of the coexistence of beauty and darkness that the moth symbolises. The writing and drawing on the panels is disorderly and mostly illegible, and the glass shards are sharp and stick out from the sides, giving the altar an air of being created in a desperate state and nearing collapse any second, as well as adding an element of danger, for if the audience were to move too close, they might easily cut themselves on the glass, or damage the work.
Although deeply woven with religious overtones, Altarpiece does not celebrate religion, but adapts iconography and ritual items from my adolescence at a Christian school to honour my experiences of love, grief, illness, and identity which have transgressed the institution of the church and its enduring power over personal autonomy, particularly, as Laurinda Dixon notes, over female healthcare (2009 ). Where The Metamorphosis and Pupa explore the felt-attributes of pain and illness, Altarpiece is an expression of how sociocultural context shapes an illness narrative––the sufferer might struggle more, for example, if their needs or sense of self are incongruent with the moral alignment of those in their lifeworld.
On the wall opposite Altarpiece hangs Pupa, perhaps the most abstract and abject of the three; while The Metamorphosis and Altarpiece almost take the form of subversive monuments, Pupa is more like an unconventional map of my body, with my real ultrasounds acting as corporeal landmarks, lepidopteran and anatomical motifs scattered around like topographic symbols, and trails of red ink joining them all like isopleths. Like the textile cocoon and Altarpiece’s plinth, Pupa layers textiles and materials upon each other, with patterned fabrics below and sheer ones above, forming something of an obfuscatory veil between realms, possibly those of the conscious and unconscious, the ‘perceptible and imperceptible’ (Bogue 2003:195), or an epidermis keeping the viscera from spilling forth. Although sheer, the top layer is painted with thinned black ink and stamped with the same moth and body motifs in darker ink, which appear as if swirling in a cloud of fog, like thoughts in a fatigued brain. The bottom layer of fabric is again printed with the same imagery, over which bright copper and red paint made from paprika and cayenne are smeared like bloody streaks or wipes of ointment, making the room smell like a mix of spices, dried flowers and herbs, and chemicals from the paints, inks, mediums and latex – an apothecary of indigestible treatments.
Similar to The Metamorphosis, many of the details, are like an internal disease, as they are inaccessible, hidden behind the sheer veil which is nailed to the wall, requiring the audience to either contemplate the work for a long time and search for the deeper layers, or accept unknowability and move on. The outermost layer is a single piece of handkerchief-sized fabric stained with red and black, like a makeshift wound compressor left at the scene of an accident, attached by a safety pin. This is the only element of the work unobscured by other layers, it is a clear, solid, and somewhat violent form against the hazy ambiguity of its background.
Deleuze and Guattari have noted that when engaging with the installation ‘material becomes expressive’ (1991:167), causing autonomic and subjective responses. The red inks and oozing materials used throughout create sensations of shock and fears of contamination before they are identified as pigments and mediums and fabrics that seem soft and pleasant are felt to be hard and cold, while sympathy arises from the materials that plainly show the anguish or feebleness of the hand that made them, or the image of a wounded body.
Fast/Slow We Holometabolise is a body of work that, much like a body in pain, exists in between the realms of that which can be physically experienced and that which can be communicated through language, as such they are two circles of the chronic illness Venn diagram which rarely overlap. Despite their language-resistant nature, however, pain and illness demand expression if their sufferer is to retain a sense of identity and connection to their environment. By transforming this suffering into artworks, as Tracey Emin and Eugenie Lee have, the unshareable and intangible becomes shareable, tangible and even experienceable. Mixed-media and installation works like My Bed and Seeing is Believing use materiality and immersion to invite viewers into the unique lifewords and somatic experiences of the chronically or mentally ill, allowing the most private and personal struggles to be encountered by an audience, regardless of their easiness to convey, ability to be understood, or familiarity to viewers. In fact, to view Fast/Slow We Holometabolise, one needn’t know anything about chronic illness and pain or their impacts on the body and psyche, for their ineffable nature lends itself to visual and sensory interpretations that go beyond simple understanding and allows for a visceral and affective interpersonal transmission of their attributes and my experience with them.
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