IN RESPONSE TO PAIN:
MOVING TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE
By
Sam Davis
BFA/B.Ed, University of Lethbridge, 2016

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2023

© Samantha Davis 2023

Exiled from the kingdom of health, the ill inherit a different land.
- Lisa Olstein
Pain Studies

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract........................................................................................................................3

List of Figures ..............................................................................................................4

Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................5

The Body In Pain .........................................................................................................7

Help or Hinder Hard to Say .......................................................................................13
		
Mobile Practice ..........................................................................................................19

Chain Reactions ........................................................................................................27

Pain Studies (A Kinder Place) ..................................................................................35

References ................................................................................................................49

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ABSTRACT
This paper considers the role of an emergent embodied art practice in better
understanding, communicating and managing the experiences of chronic illness
and chronic pain. Referencing a history of pain scales, diagnostic tools, and pain
management strategies that fail to provide adequate relief to those living with
chronic conditions, this thesis illustrates the process I have taken to reconstruct
my art practice which, built in tandem with intentional lived practices, has enabled
me to inhabit my sick body in new ways. At an intersection between queer and
chronic illness discourse, following an autotheoretical approach to making and
writing, this project is built in deep connection to my own lived experiences. Life
with chronic illness is shrouded with uncertainty and demands a practice that
embraces the ebbs and flows, trial and errors, and desperate reaches directed
by a wavering physical capacity. As such, I rely upon a network of actions that
together build the foundation of my research praxis. Connecting my work to
artists Janine Antoni, Zoe Leonard, Louise Bourgeois and Jo Spence, my thesis
body of work weaves together drawing, photography, video, sculpture, digital
collage, note-taking, dancing and walking as different modes of making. The
residual artworks produced through these embodied practices work together to
communicate my experience as an artist living with chronic illness. Concurrently,
these practices offer themselves as maintenance, aiding in managing the
symptoms of my physical condition and in the development of a sustainable art
practice, re-imagined to work with the needs of my body rather than against it.

3

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 01.

Sam Davis, Pain Tracking, Pain Study, 2023

Figure 02.

Sam Davis, Pain is a Fog, 2022

Figure 03.

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1999

Figure 04.

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992-1997

Figure 05.

Sam Davis, Untitled(Sewn Bread), 2017

Figure 06.

Sam Davis, Untitled (Bread Mending), 2022

Figure 07.

Sam Davis, Help or Hinder Hard to Say, 2022

Figure 08.

Sam Davis, Baguette Piece, First Showing, 2022

Figure 09.

Sam Davis, Baguette Piece, Second Showing, 2022

Figure 10.

Sam Davis, Various Pain Studies, 2022-2023

Figure 11.

Sam Davis, Still from Performance for No one, Anyone, 2022

Figure 12.

Sam Davis, Heating Pad Overuse, Pain Study, 2023

Figure 13.

Sam Davis, Bed is the Hardest Place, 2022

Figure 14.

Sam Davis, Chain Reactions, Pain Studies, 2022

Figure 15.

Sam Davis, Chain Reactions, Pain Studies, 2022

Figure 16.

Sam Davis, By Night, 2022

Figure 17.

Louise Bourgeois, What is the Shape of This Problem, 1999

Figure 18.

Sam Davis, Pain is the Pea, 2022

Figure 19.

Sam Davis, Residues, Pain Studies 2022

Figure 20.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 21.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 22.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 23.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 24.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 25.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 26.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 27.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 28.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 29.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Figure 30.

Jo Spence, The Final Project, Various 7, 1991-1992

Figure 31.

Sam Davis, Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many through whose support this thesis and accompanying body of
work was made possible. For all of your contributions, conversations and care, I
am so fortunate.
Thank you first to my supervisor, Jacqueline Turner for your generosity, both
of time and of feedback. It is through our weekly chats and your unwavering
support that this body of work and writing has come to flourish.
To Mimi Gellman, thank you for always being a safe place to talk about health
and for the depths of care you extend to all you come in contact with.
To Randy Lee Cutler, thank you for consistently generative conversation and for
helping me to understand the method behind the madness of a diverse research
praxis.
To my peers, in learning alongside you I have grown, both in practice and as
person. Thank you for your care in critique and for your continual vulnerability
and generosity.
Thank you to my family for always prioritizing creativity and self-expression in all
its forms. Through your encouragement, I first came to know and value a diverse
creative practice and through your support, continue to watch it grow.
To Adryn, thank you for weathering, for being a consistent place to turn despite
the curves life throws our way. So much of who I am and how I think has come
through time spent in your presence. For you, I’m always grateful.
Thank you to Anna and Karoline. Our inability to have small conversations and
the resulting deep dives have led to my thinking about life and art continuously
expanding. For all the kitchen chats and late-night dances, I am richer through
our friendship.
Thank you to Ellie and Zoe for reminding me that through play, anything is
possible.

5

Fig. 1: Pain Tracking, Pain Study, 2023

Flickering, quivering, pulsing, throbbing, beating, pounding, jumping, flashing,
shooting, pricking, boring, drilling, stabbing, lacerating, pinching, pressing,
gnawing, cramping, crushing, tugging, pulling, wrenching, hot, burning, scalding,
searing, tingling, itchy, smarting, stinging, dull, sore, hurting, aching, heavy,
tender, taut, rasping, splitting, tiring, exhausting, sickening, suffocating, fearful,
frightful, terrifying, punishing, gruelling, cruel, vicious, killing, wretched, blinding,
annoying, troublesome, miserable, intense, unbearable, spreading, radiating,
penetrating, piercing, tight, numb, drawing, squeezing, tearing, cool, cold,
freezing, nagging, nauseating, agonizing, dreadful, torturing.
McGill Pain Questionnaire, Self Report Diagnostic Tool1
6

THE BODY IN PAIN
I came to what I know now as my art practice accidentally. Months before the
arrival of the pandemic I moved to the unceded traditional territories of the
Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people, also known as Vancouver,
British Columbia. Slowly becoming orientated to my new surroundings, the arrival
of COVID-19 swiftly shut down the city, and with it, the connections I had just
begun to make. I found myself without a job; as a primary and secondary school
instructor already struggling with burnout, I had little desire to apply for teaching
certification in my new province, much less to begin a teaching contract within
the new reality of Zoom school. Having dealt with a sharp decline in my physical
health the year prior, I had come to recognize that the demands of working within
the classroom exceeded the capacities of my physicality. Consistently blowing
past my limitations had left me in a state of disconnect, out of touch with my
body’s quiet pleas, it began yelling.

Fig. 2: Pain is a Fog, 2022
7

In her book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry speaks of the “unsharability” of pain
due at least in part to its resistance to language, a quality she describes as “not
simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but essential to what it is.”2 I
have found this to be true; sleepless nights spent scanning for the right words to
bring to my doctors to help them get it, to bring my pain forward enough to make
it visible, to make it real, an affirmation; to make them finally say, “Yes, I see how
badly you are hurting, I’m here to help.”
But shooting, stabbing, wrenching, blinding, nauseating, suffocating, they all fall
short.
A dead metaphor is a word or phrase that has lost its metaphoric force through
common usage and try as I might, my words lie flat.3
How do you describe pain when you’ve been in it for so long you no longer know
what pain isn’t?4
Life with chronic illness is shrouded in constant clouds of not knowing. Lack
of diagnoses, strategies to manage symptoms, words to explain to others how
shitty you feel. Not knowing what thing you did or ate or didn’t do caused the
flare of symptoms you are currently battling, how to pinpoint the exact location
where those symptoms reside and how to get the flared-up body to calm back
down again. Where things started, when they started and how they’ve changed
and intensified since; not knowing lives in the lack of diagnosis, in the abyss that
is pain with no end in sight.
“When one speaks about ‘one’s own physical pain’ and about ‘another person’s
physical pain,’ one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct
orders of events,”5 writes Scarry. She continues, “[f]or the person whose pain it
is, it is ‘effortlessly’ grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not
be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is ‘effortless’
is not grasping it.”6
Despite being so familiar with the experience of housing pain, I came to recognize
the inadequacy of the current medical system in providing me with the ability to
understand, communicate and manage the symptoms of my chronic conditions
in a meaningful, connective way. Talking about pain (both their own and the pain
of others) tends to make people uncomfortable and so we don’t. Instead, we
8

avoid the topic whenever possible, thus rendering the sick body a lonely place
to live.
Each piece of writing that I’ve found on the subject seems to carry the same
sentiment; pain is hard to talk about. In her book, Pain Studies, Lisa Olstein
reiterates, “[d]espite or perhaps because of the dizzyingly various ways we
categorize and conceptualize (let alone experience) pain, we’re notoriously bad
at talking about it, even literally, as in, do you have it, how much, where, what
kind?”7 I’ve been asked to describe my pain in numbers, 0-10, how bad is it?
“Where does pain worth measuring begin?”8 Eula Biss asks in her essay, The
Pain Scale. Similarly, I wonder how, on a scale from non-existent to the worst
pain imaginable, I could ever accurately depict the fluidity of my painscape. Ever
fluctuating, pulsing, breathing, my pain is alive and takes up space.
Kept awake one particularly pain-fueled night, I came to realize that through
years of attempting to ignore the increasingly intensifying symptoms through
which my body was trying to communicate with me, I had lost the ability to be
present in its sensations entirely. That night, however, I experienced a shift; I
began to consider the potential of spending time with pain rather than simply
in it. In the early phases of this work, spending time with pain, I did not have a
clear understanding of what this meant, nor the direction I was moving. I began
only with questions; What if the pain could be there without the need to actively
suffer it? What else was there besides pain? What else could pain become?
I have come to rely on an emergent and embodied art practice as a tool to
subvert the dynamic between myself and pain, to spend time with it without
being consumed by it. What is the advantage of an emergent art practice? It
creates space for not knowing, for not needing to have all of the answers in order
to begin. Allowing each step to inform the one that follows, the work remains
in process and with this perpetual motion, moves in the general direction of
forward. With each step, each iteration, each question, each piece of writing,
drawing, or making comes the potential for the next step, turn, return or pivot
and with it, the work continues to become.
Janine Antoni describes her body as a funnel through which the world has been
poured.9 Central to her artwork, Antoni uses her body as both a tool for making
and as a source of conceptual meaning within her art practice. In Lick and Lather,
Antoni cast fourteen self-portrait busts, seven made from chocolate and the
9

other seven, from soap, gradually reshaping her image by licking and washing
the sculptures.10 Challenging the traditionally upheld standards of beauty by
distortion of self-image, Antoni’s employment of familiar materials transforms
these daily care-based rituals, promoting an empathetic recognition of the
making process within her viewer.11

It is this dual relationship of the artist’s

body showing up as tool and subject simultaneously that interests me most for it
speaks to my own ways of making.

Fig. 3: Lick and Lather, Janine Antoni, 1999
Figure Removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a photograph
of Antoni’s “Lick and Lather” showing two lines of busts displayed on top of white
cylindrical plinths.
http://www.janineantoni.net/lick-and-lather

I have had to create space for pain to show up within my practice as my subject,
collaborator and constant company while I work. In permitting pain to show up
within my body and my practice rather than fighting to drown it out, I’ve created
space to explore our relationship through a lens of curiosity and expansiveness.
When drawing with pain, I allow it to guide the types of marks I make while
following it around my body. When dancing with pain, I allow it to guide the
succession of movements that I follow. In working with rather than against my
pain, I seek to share with it the agency to direct my making process.
In their book, Living Creatively with Chronic Illness, Eugine G.Wheeler and Joyce
Dace-Lombard speak to the value of pain investigation. “An approach that works
especially well when pain is intense involves investigating it,” they explain.
“This means opening yourself to the pain, leaning into it, softening around it,
and allowing yourself to move beyond the anticipated fearful experience. This
approach, too, involves using your creative imagination.”12
I have found art-making to be an ideal tool for conducting such pain investigations.
Through a process of multi-media experimentation; action, reflection and
response, I think through making. With each step and each iteration, I learn
10

something new about my pain, creating a residual trail of artworks that seek to
communicate my internal experience along the way. This is not art therapy, I am
not looking to heal myself, my doctors all agree that I am chronically ill. I have not,
however, accepted the current status of my body as permanent and hold firm to
the belief that there is always room to feel better.
Autotheory is a mode of creating art, writing or literature that seeks to combine
autobiographical thoughts and experiences with philosophical and theoretical
discourse as a resistance to traditional genera conventions and boundaries
between disciplines.13 Flexible in nature, autotheory can take the form of art,
art writing and literature, providing space for self-analysis grounded within
and simultaneously challenging broader political and cultural epistemologies.14
“Autotheory reveals the tenuousness of maintaining illusory separations between
art and life, theory and practice, work and the self, research and motivation, just
as feminist artists and scholars have long argued,”15 writes Lauren Fournier in her
book, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism.
As chronic illness and pain present as a deeply personal and individualized
experience, I have found that through using an autotheorical approach to making
and writing, I have been able to draw from and embed my own lived experience
within the broader chronic illness discourse. “The trouble with standard pain
scales, it seems to me, is that they weren’t written by the right people- the
people in pain,”16 writes Olstein in Pain Studies. “Often misheard as language
that does not communicate, it turns out that the seemingly chaotic fragments
of description people in pain manage to offer in face cohere into meaningful
systems of categorization.”17 It is crucial for the voices of those living with chronic
illness to show up in the progression of reimagined health care and I’ve found
autotheory to be a tool to recenter lived experience as a vital component of
research.
Carmen Papalia is a social practice artist and disability activist whose work
is rooted in concerns of access within the public sphere.18 Responding to the
failures of the institutional disability support services that he was offered when
a hereditary condition resulted in the obstruction of his vision, Papalia’s “Open
Access” manifesto presents a framework that reconsiders accessibility through
a lens of mutual care.19

Offering five main tenets, the self-described “non-

visual” artist presents accessibility as a practice centred around the needs of
those present; adapted, negotiated and upheld through mutual exchange.20 In
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opposition to the “recipient of support and provider” power structure created
through enforced policies aiming to mitigate concerns of access, Papalia’s Open
Access redistributes agency among those present, recognizing interdependence
as being central to the radical restructuring of power.21 Referencing individualized
embodied knowledge, Open Access works to “reimagine normalcy” by embracing
the expansive and complex nature of identities present within each temporary,
collective space.22 Through perpetual negotiation, Papalia’s framework cultivates
trust between individuals to create a network of support that is responsive to
each of their disclosed needs.
With his central focus on creating interdependent learning communities, Papalia’s
work through Open Access led me to consider the potential reach of the principles
I was building within my own art practice. Describing his approach as “not only
relevant to a group of people with atypical bodies or minds or behaviours, but
to anybody who is living in relation to other people,”23 I too, recognize the ways
that my work can extend outside of chronic illness discourse and benefit those
interested in building an art practice fit to accommodate their individualized
needs, habits and lifestyles. While all pain is individual, all individuals have pain.
I believe that art can be a tool to help us get in touch with our pain in new ways
and in doing so, lead us to understand more about ourselves and what conditions
we need in order to succeed. It is through this deepened understanding that we
become more capable of advocating for ourselves and I see this as an opportunity
for connection; keeping the needs of each individual front and centre we can
work to rely on each other to build a network of interdependence.

12

HELP OR HINDER HARD TO SAY

Fig. 4: Strange Fruit, Zoe Leonard, 1992-1997
Figure Removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a photograph
of Leonard’s “Strange Fruit” comprised of an assortment of mended fruit skins laid out
on the gallery floor.
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/92277

During the 1980’s and 90’s Zoe Leonard was living and working in New York City.
A prominent AIDS activist and advocate for queer liberation, Leonard lost many
friends to the virus at the height of the AIDS epidemic.24 It was during this time
that the process of making what came to be known as Strange Fruit began. The
work, made up of 295 fruit skins stitched back together upon the consumption
of their fruits was born, not as an artwork, but as a coping method following
the loss of her friend and fellow artist, David Wojnarowicz. Finding solace in the
meditative action of mending, over the course of five years Leonard repaired
banana, orange, grapefruit and avocado peels, embellishing them with buttons,
zippers and wax and sinew. For the year and a half following the making of
Strange Fruit, Leonard worked alongside a conservator, attempting to prevent
the decomposition of her fruit peels. It was only upon achieving the desired
preservation that Leonard determined that the process of decay was integral
to the work and that no conservation techniques would be applied.25 Raising
questions around the value of permanence, Leonard’s fruits are displayed almost
haphazardly, laid out covering the gallery floor. Inviting her viewers to engage
with a living medium, one that shrivels and rots and crumbles with the impact
of time and careless footsteps, we are reminded of the fragility of life and of our
own death.
As in Leonard’s Strange Fruit, I first came to this way of working as a means
of coping. In 2017, during a period of deterioration in my own health with no
answers coming back from tests and doctors, I found myself sewing a loaf of
bread back together in my living room one evening. Using thick black thread,
there was something in the repetitive action, the care needed to stitch bread
13

back together without ripping it that felt cathartic. Stored in the bag it came in,
the bread proceeded to rot around its sutures a week later. At the time, I was
operating on impulse, yet to understand the significance of the living medium
that I was working with and its parallels to the body.

Fig.5: Untitled (Sewn Bread), 2017

Fig.6: Untitled (Bread Mending), 2022

Years later, still struggling to cope with flaring pain, I found myself again sewing
a loaf of bread back together. Gluten-free this time, as per the diet I now follow,
and with delicate thread matched in colour to the bread’s crust, I was determined
to mend with a higher level of care than I had shown to the loaf’s predecessor.
Completed in one eight-hour sitting so as to prevent the bread from drying out,
the process of creating Untitled (Bread Mending) was simultaneously an act of
endurance and a space of solace. At times, the making of this work pulled me
out of the sensations of my own body, the repetitive stitching offering itself as
a sort of meditative action and a reprieve from my pain. Other times, however, it
was met with frustration; the crumbling gluten-free bread continually ripped, my
14

back ached, I wanted to be done. Upon its completion, the slices of bread were
once again returned back to their initial loaf form. From a distance, the threads
holding each slice together seem to disappear; it is only upon closer examination
that the evidence of mending is revealed. Mimicking the experience of pain,
invisible and easily overlooked without further inquiry, this piece became a sort
of self-portrait, an expression of the unseen work that goes into maintaining a
body with an invisible illness.
The making of Untitled (Bread Mending) prompted me to think deeper about
my impulse to use bread as a stand-in for my own body within my practice.
When I began working with bread back in 2017, I was teaching and had a student
explain to me that in Egyptian Arabic the word for life, Aish, is colloquially used
to refer to bread as well. This notion of bread as life has felt particularly poignant
through the process of recognizing that my body is no longer able to digest
gluten. Unable to consume bread, its dough became as inedible as clay for me
and thus, brought me to explore it further as an art medium.
Help or Hinder Hard to Say is a recent body of work that I have iterated and
displayed twice during my time at Emily Carr University. Comprised of ten breadbased sculptures (some loaves boughten, some baked by myself), the various
loaves of bread are formed, altered and staged questioning whether their
interventions are there to help or harm. Staples penetrate the bread’s skin in an
attempt to mitigate the deep cuts carved into its surface, bandaids cling to dried
cubes, awkwardly forcing them to find their way back together and bread bulges
between the binding of elastics working to contain its torn pieces. Together they
beg the question; help or hinder? Hard to say.
This body of work explores the ways that despite our best intentions, providing
care remains an elusive and sometimes misguided practice. Regardless of our
best efforts, we may not always know what is needed when caring for ourselves
and for others and at times, may make things worse despite our best intentions. In
the context of chronic illness, the continual process of symptom management is
made tiresome by the recognition that the underlying cause is in fact, unsolvable.
Made worse by the fickle nature of a body riddled with inflammation, it is often
hard to differentiate between the things that will help and cause harm as they
remain forever in flux. What works today causes problems tomorrow and so,
Help or Hinder Hard to Say became a place to explore the feelings of futility that
accompany an attempt to care for and mend a body that will not recover.
15

Fig.7: Help or Hinder Hard to Say, 2022

In an interview with Anna Blume, Leonard references the process of repair she
enacts on her fruit skins stating, “This act of fixing something broken, repairing
the skin after the fruit is gone strikes me as both pathetic and beautiful. At any
rate, as intensely human. You can try to fix it, but the fruit is gone. And yet, we
need repositories for our grief. We need eulogies. And relics. Monuments and
mementos.”26 Embracing the natural tendency of all things breaking down with
time, Leonard grants her work the opportunity to change form and decay without
intervention. It begs the question, does the value of an object deteriorate as it
does? Or, can something be gained in the process of breaking down?
In Baguette Piece, exhibited in both renditions of Help or Hinder Hard to Say,
what began as a bakery baguette fastened with tied cord to a comically long
hot water bottle, changed in meaning upon the progression of decomposition.
In the process of installing the work for the second time, months after the initial
showing, the now dry baguette broke in half, becoming more dependent on the
support of the hot water bottle it was bound to. Previously unclear as to whether
it was support or restraint that was being offered through its bindings, the now
16

broken bread seems to suggest itself as a recipient of care. With its pain now
visible, this wound became an unintentional strength of the work, providing
with it, emergent meaning. Like Leonard, I’ve come to see the decomposition of
this living material as an integral component of each breadwork’s life. It is in the
celebration of impermanence that these works become, allowed to live, change
and break down rather than frozen in time.

Fig.8: Baguette Piece, First Showing, 2022

Fig.9: Baguette Piece, Second Showing, 2022

17

Fig.10: Various Pain Studies, 2022-2023

18

MOBILE PRACTICE
In a closed-down city in the early days of the pandemic, my body ached from an
excess of time spent sitting and so, I turned to walking. Initially an attempt to keep
my body in motion, my walks slowly became more intentional and I developed a
walking practice. Without a preconceived plan, route or timeline, I found myself
wandering through the city, documenting my walks on impulse. Using my phone
to collect photographs, videos, audio recordings and written thoughts, I did not
have a plan for the things that I was gathering but allowed them to accumulate all
the same. With time, I came to realize I had created a trail of my artistic impulses
and curiosities, a sort of archive that I could return to and build off of on the next
walk. I have since come to recognize these walks as the methodology through
which I work, a sort of digital sketchbook or record-keeping that paired with
movement, activates my thinking in an embodied way. It is here, in my mobile
practice, that I begin to slowly formulate, shape and massage the ideas that
through time, become my bodies of work.

Fig.11: Still from Performance for No one, Anyone, Walk Documentation, 2022

19

When I say that I have a walking practice, I am referring to the many fluctuating
strands of practice I rely on while moving through the city. The walk itself provides
movement, through which I am able to tap into a creative mind space easier; I
find that I can only keep up with my thoughts while I’m in motion. My notes app
has become a key tool to keep track of my thinking, consistently jotting down
thoughts about my body, my art practice, projects and processes, as well as my
surroundings while I move. Serving many functions, these notes operate as a
sort of digital memory, a place to collect thoughts to return to and build off of on
future walks, within the studio, and as I go about my living.
I make so that I can think. Orientating around a problem; searching and practicing
towards a solution, I learn something new each time I reengage with an idea,
question or medium. I suppose in the context of making art, this could be known
as iterating. I think through doing; unable to think directly at something, I have
learned to think and make around it and have fostered the role of movement
within my creative process. Speaking on the meaning of orientation within her
book, Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed suggests that we are orientated so
long as we know where we are when we turn one way or another.27 By such
definition, I have been orientated, turned towards my body’s pain for as long as
I can remember.
Antithetical to the interest of a sore body, in an attempt to evade pangs brought
on by sudden movement, I tend to hold stiff around pain. Writing of repetitive
strain injuries, Ahmed explains, “We repeat some actions, sometimes over and
over again, and this is partly about the nature of the work we might do. Our body
takes the shape of this repetition; we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect
of this work[…] The work of repetition is not neutral work; it orients the body
in some ways rather than others.”28 Having held this position for so long, I’ve
become aware that my spine no longer rests in its proper orientation. As such,
periods of immobility result in my bones settling further into the wrong spots,
adding still further pain and stiffness to the equation (sitting here for so long
writing this paper has been tough). “Depending on which way one turns,” Ahmed
writes, “different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated
over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction. It is not, then,
that bodies simply have a direction, or that they follow directions, in moving this
way or that. Rather, in moving this way, rather than that, and moving in this way
again and again, the surfaces of the bodies in turn acquire their shape. Bodies
are ‘’directed and they take the shape of this direction.”29
20

Just as my body has been shaped by the direction of pain, I have observed the
shaping process at work within the bodies of archives that I have accumulated.
Through directing my focus toward crafting practices that provide embodied
engagement with the topics that I am researching and theorizing, I’ve been able
to maintain a body of work that is thematically consistent, despite the wide
variety of methods and media through which I practice. When I speak of practice,
I am referring to a set of actions that I engage with in a repetitive manner that,
through deliberate attention and effort, yield growth within an area of focus. I do
not find it helpful to view a distinction between the things that I am practicing
within my personal life and within my art practice. Instead, through viewing both
as an opportunity for expansive engagement, each question, idea, movement,
and media experimentation becomes a space for ritualistic play. In What Exactly
is Play and Why is it such a Powerful Vehicle for Learning, Peter Gray offers play
as an opportunity to step outside of “the immediately present real world” and
into one of imagination.30 The need for space from one’s present reality is but a
symptom of chronic illness; to sit in pain and sickness all the time leads to defeat.
I’ve found play to be disruptive in that it provides an alternative path, one where
the conditions are mine to set and free to move as I see fitting.

Fig.12: Heating Pad Overuse,
Pain Study, 2023

21

I see walking as a form of play that helps me to move through stuck spots and
I’ve found this to be true within my art practice, body and mind. Upon moving
through these spots, I find myself naturally engaged in my creative processes
for my capacities for noticing and responding are higher. Oscillating between
internal and external worlds, I find my thoughts take a walk as I do. Stopping
briefly to photograph, video, audio record or jot down a note as I walk, I work
to maintain my pace as I’ve noticed a correlation between my physical and
productive momentum.
By abstaining from creating a route, timeline or destination and instead following
my curiosities and impulses wherever they lead, I’ve become aware of patterns
in the things I’m intuitively drawn to. This is the same process I apply to my
artmaking, rather than trying to control an intended product, I have found it yields
better results to instead focus on building intentional practices that make space
for the ways that I intuitively work and the patterns in content I gravitate toward.
Lack of attachment to a specific outcome has allowed me to play with practice
as a means of accumulating and producing archives. These archives become
raw material to play with, moulding and shaping as my thinking and practices
progress. Always in iteration, these practices remain in flux, growing and shifting
alongside my needs for them, becoming a project in and of themselves.
By definition, to be mobile is to be capable of moving or being moved and within
the context of my art practice, mobility wears many hats.31 First and foremost,
my practice is mobile in that so much of it takes place in motion. Similar to my
walking practice, I have built dancing and stretching in as key components of
my daily routines as through them, my body feels better. Once again using my
mobile phone as my main tool, I conduct pain investigations while engaging in
these practices; photographing trailing marks on my stomach left behind from
heating pad overuse, videoing myself as I stretch, searching for answers in my
misalignments, recording the sounds that escape from my mouth at the height of
a pain flare to understand more about the language that pain speaks. Studying
the sensations of my body as I move, I seek to expand out of the stiffness I’ve
been stuck in for so long.
Capable of serving multiple functions, lightweight and always with me, my phone
makes it possible for me to engage in my art practice in tandem with my lived
practices. Through framing components of my lived routines, such as stretching,
as a type of art-action, it has granted me the space for creative experimentation
22

Fig.13: Bed is the Hardest Place, 2022

23

each time that I practice. It is in this space of playful embodied investigation that
I have come to understand more about my physical condition.
Leading up to a semester critique, I found myself stuck in bed with flaring pain.
Deadlines wait for no ill body and as such, I looked for ways to create within the
confines of my present physical reality. Having recently bought a new phone, I
realized its capacity to isolate an image from a photograph with a single click and
began creating digital collages built from my collected archive of photographs.
The ease provided by this method of digital cutting and pasting allowed me to
create directly from the bed I shared with pain.
Bed is the Hardest Place became the somewhat meta portrayal of the state that
I was stuck in. Arms and legs extended fully, the image of my body floats above
my bed, surrounded by darkness. A leg and hand are seen resting on a second
bed, emerging from the foreground of the composition as the body of a viewer.
Serving two functions, this figure is first my own body, watching with distance
itself lost within the grasp of pain. Simultaneously, it operates as the body of the
viewer of the image, it becomes your leg and your hand as I invite you in to sit
with me, with pain. A hand emerges from the top of the image as a third figure, a
palmed flower petal presented as a sort of offering to the suffering body. Once
again made from my own image, this hand suggests a self removed from suffering
and capable of providing comfort through its learned distance. I see this third
self as the one I’ve come to occupy through my embodied practices. In creating
a place to store pain outside of my body and practices that allow me to sit with
pain rather than in it, I’ve moved toward creating distance from my suffering.
Simultaneously to and through building what I now know as my art practice, I
experienced a similar redirect to which Ahmed writes. Turning to face the queer
identity that I had struggled to permit myself to understand and embrace, I
turned to art-making to help me explore the self that was emerging. There is
pain in reorientation; the grieving of the self you leave behind and the youthful
clumsiness of making space for the new one to move in. Emotional pain is not
so different from physical pain and I have carried both, in my body, in the same
way. It was through my walks, having so much time to think; listening, looking
and noticing out in the world, that I was forced to turn and look the same way
within myself. Ahmed writes, “Orientation involves aligning body and space: we
only know which way to turn once we know which way we are facing.”32 Coming
out as queer needed to happen in order for my art practice to be realized and at
24

the same time, this practice needed to be realized in order to bring myself to the
point of being able to come out. Both happened simultaneously, opening with
them, space that had previously been occupied. It was in that space that I found
myself with the capacity to begin cultivating a new relationship with my chronic
illness and pain and have come to view all of my practices as an opportunity to
reorientate back to self.

25

Fig.14: Chain Reactions, Pain Studies, 2022

Fig.15: Chain Reactions, Pain Studies, 2022

26

CHAIN REACTIONS
I experience chronic illness as a series of chain reactions that reverberate through
my body; different catalysts sparking events and bringing with them, each, a
series of different symptoms. These catalysts go off like fireworks, igniting each
other, and once again I find myself flaring. Requiring a carefully crafted string
of soothing events to bring my body back from a flare, and yet another still to
arrive back mentally, rarely do we discuss the emotional tax of re-stabilizing
oneself after weathering the depths of a pain flare. Following still, is the social
tax that comes with remerging, walking around wearing the mask of health again
until the inevitable; the next trigger sets off a chain of reactions and pulls you
in. It is in this constant work of orientation, of travelling inward to tend to the
needs of the lamenting body and back outwards to rejoin the world of health
that one becomes disorientated. As such, it is natural to begin trying to identify
the catalysts and triggers prompting these health events, seeking to understand
which factors bring with them which symptoms. Being in this heightened mode
of observation, patterns begin to emerge and with them, a series of variables
that one can play with to work towards the intended outcome; a body that feels
better.
Considered through a queer lens, I began observing chain reactions in my life as
I dismantled the expectations I had been given for who and how I was to show
up in the world. Through this process, I turned to focus similar attention toward
my art practice, to reconsider the set of rules and conditions for making that
I had been operating under. “There are also important cognitive components
to embodied transformation,”33 writes Alta Starr in her essay, Cultivating the
Self: Embodied Transformation for Artists. “One of the most essential of which
is consistently orienting ourselves towards the principles inside the practices,
aiming our attention, intention and action toward the new shape we desire.
Understanding these principles allows us to sustain our momentum toward
transformation without getting tangled in and stymied by questions of technique
or the inevitable differences among differently-abled bodies.”34

Identifying

aspects that previously stood as barriers to my making, I worked to shed my
assumptions of how I thought an art practice was supposed to look and function
and instead, made room for what it could look like in a way that works for me.
Through this, I have been able to redirect my practice.

27

Bound by the ever-fluctuating constraints of my physicality, the largest obstacle
to my making is the unpredictable nature of my ability, shifting day to day, hour
to hour. Will it be able to handle producing the things that I dream up? Can it
work for the number of hours in a day needed to be deemed productive by the
institutions I operate within? Will the tools I need to make the work be too heavy,
too cumbersome, my body too weak? Demonstrated by the days following the
push in my production prior to each semester critique, this is a negotiation I still
often come out on the wrong side of; my pain flares. There is a lot of mental weight
that accompanies an attempt to exist at and beyond your physical limitations.
Harder still, these limitations are often hazy and dynamic and hard to accept and
so, we (those of us with chronic health conditions) push too hard. I think back to
Papalia’s Open Access, specifically his fourth tenant, which reads:
“Open Access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and
potential to thrive. It reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments,
identities, realities and learning styles and operates under the tenet that
interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power.”35
It is the disruption of disabling conditions mentioned here that I wish to highlight.
Currently, so much falls on the individual to advocate for and accommodate their
own needs, especially within institutions that operate in direct conflict with them.
Moving through my MFA at Emily Carr, I have felt myself consistently running to
catch up as so much of my time and energy has been dedicated to carving out
lived and art practices that could be sustained physically within the demands of
the program. I have been questioned on why I speak and write so much more of
my practices than my artworks and it is because this is where the vast majority
of my thinking has had to reside.
Without a routine, carefully structured to avoid pushing past my fluctuating
and fickle physical constraints, it is easy to lose entire days to pain. In order to
maintain the speed of production necessary to be successful within this program
while simultaneously ensuring I was being mindful of tending to the needs of
my physicality, it required a body of work where my own body could become
the central focus. Through building an art practice where acts of physical
maintenance such as stretching, walking and spending time sitting with pain
were recognized as productive components, I found that I was able to reframe
my understanding of productivity.

28

I believe that as art educators, it is our responsibility to assist students in
disrupting the disabling conditions that prevent them from achieving their highest
potential, something that needs to be considered beyond their academic person.
I believe that this comes through guiding students to a point of higher cogency
around their own personal requirements; as a student, as an artist and, most
importantly, as a human. The impact of instructors who recognized and bolstered
a diverse praxis was significant in leading me to embrace the methods I work by
and helped me to quiet voices of doubt around the validity of my process. At a
systemic level, the creation of spaces dedicated to recognizing and upholding
the complexity of embodiments provides safety for its members. In creating
space for the needs of the individual to be integrated within the greater system,
we create the opportunity for each person to flourish under the conditions that
best serve them.

Fig.16: By Night, 2022
29

When my pain is quiet I work with my hands. It is here that I have the mental
and physical capacity to do more, for pain takes up less space. Trained first in
drawing and painting during my undergraduate degree, I have since reconciled
my body’s protest of long days spent in the studio and have moved my practice
into my home. With built-in breaks for movement, stretching, soaking in the
tub and chairs with heating pads, pillows and blankets, I create in quick bursts
integrated within my living. I prefer to work with what is immediately available
to me. Non-precious materials such as Crayola markers and cheap sketchbook
paper make drawing easier for I am less concerned with making errors, resulting
in a freer hand to explore my ideas with. As drawing is a tool that helps me to slow
myself down by bringing me back into the sensations of my body, creating visual
representations of its invisible symptoms provides a helpful mental distance from
pain’s discomfort.
When the pain is high I exist within the walls of my body. Try as I might to be
present in the outside world, pain is insistent in its yelling, leaving me no choice
but to head inside to try to locate, spend time and communicate with it. At night, I
keep the lights out, conducting pain studies by drawing the sensations that I feel
inside myself on large-scale paper in front of me. Use a hand-triggered counter
to track the number of times that pain demanded I look at it that day, contort my
body into new positions to understand pain’s pathways, record myself speaking
through its seizes and sears in the hope that I may stumble upon the words,
the sounds, the thing that still evades me. Less concerned by the outcomes or
products created through engaging in these pain studies, I instead use them as
a place of media ideation and pain management; an opportunity to find ways to
inhabit pain outside of simply suffering it. Moving between media and approach,

Fig. 17: What is the Shape of This Problem, Louise Bourgeios, 1999
Figure Removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a photograph
of Bourgeios’ “What is the Shape of this Problem” showing pairs of nine drawings and
accompanying text led with a title card.
https://www.marlboroughnewyork.com/exhibitions/louise-bourgeois-what-is-theshape-of-this-problem#tab:slideshow;tab-1:slideshow
30

what starts as a thought becomes a note becomes a photograph becomes a
digital collage becomes a video becomes a drawing as its thinking grows and
evolves. Sometimes only a slight shift from the piece that came before it and
other times a dramatic departure, I find thinking across media to be helpful in
setting off chains of reactions that wouldn’t be possible while working within just
one.
Despite being best known for her large-scale sculptures and installation art,
Louise Bourgeois had a prolific drawing and writing practice throughout her
life.36 Her way of working between media, iterating and building upon ideas
as they took on different forms within her work has always resonated with me.
In What is The Shape of This Problem, a series of nine paired lithograph and
typeface diptychs, this question, presented as an introduction to the following
pairs of image and text, gestures to the ways she thought about her making.
The prints, abstract images whose forms seem to suggest knots and webs in red
and black ink pair with cryptic written musings that explore themes ranging from
torment and revenge to hope and repair. At times, appearing in conversation
with the paired image and at others, offering a less straightforward connection,
Bourgeois’ inclusion of text provides us with insight into her inner world and
emotions, while opening the door for us to contemplate our own associations to
the themes that she calls up.
Beginning as written musings about the ways that pain was inhabiting my body, I
conducted a series of fifteen text-based drawings titled, Pain Hurts! to illustrate
a group of cell phone notes that I collected over the span of several months.
Considering the failings of language in articulating experiences of pain, I was
struck by my inability to describe the sensations I was confronted with without
relying on metaphor and began using my written notes as drawing prompts
to further explore my words through image making. Working in this emergent
manner, each time I found myself with pain, I looked to reframe my experience,
hoping to better understand and communicate the sensations in my body by
considering them through new associations. With each drawing, I imagined pain’s
way of being; the ways that it inhabited the space that is my body and at times,
extended past it, the different shapes and disguises it took on when it came
knocking. These drawings became a place for me to sit with pain and humour
simultaneously, a series of self-portraits and accompanying text rendered
playfully in bright colours, reminiscent of children’s drawings.

31

In Pain is the Pea, my crudely drawn likeness sits upon a stack of mattresses,
kept awake by pain; expressed through dashed red and yellow lines emitting
from my body and from a pea, hidden beneath the mattress stack. Framed in text
reading, “Pain is the Pea Under Every Mattress” this spoof on the well-known
fairytale suggests the nagging persistence of pain that is chronic, showing up
to disrupt despite conditions put in place to mask its presence. In a medium
that refuses to be taken too seriously, this series allowed me to play with the
pain I was experiencing, shifting my emotional response to it by challenging its
authority by depicting it in bright colours and playful imagery. Through this body
of work, I hope to suggest that there is more to a life with chronic pain than just
suffering. I have found that through expanding the ways that we talk about and
engage with pain, we can continue to expand upon the ways that we embody it
as well.

Fig.18: Pain is the Pea, 2022
32

An arrival takes time, and the time that it takes shapes “what” it is that arrives.
The object could even be described as the transformation of time into form,
which itself could be redefined as the “direction” of matter. What arrives not only
depends on time, but is shaped by the conditions of its arrival, by how it came
to get here. Think of a sticky object; what it picks up on its surface “shows”
where it has traveled and what it has come into contact with. You bring your past
encounters with you when you arrive.
- Sara Ahmed
Queer Phenomenology

33

Fig.19: Residues, Pain Studies, 2022

34

PAIN STUDIES (A KINDER PLACE)
I came to the concept of residues while documenting and collecting on my walks.
Drawn to posters wheat-pasted onto signposts, bleached by sun and rain, returned
entirely back to white, I felt the need to photograph them without understanding
the impulse behind it. Scratched-out stickers, cracks in the concrete, ripples
of paint built up in layers upon each other; I didn’t know why I was collecting
these images, they didn’t make for interesting photographs on their own, but I
felt the need to do so all the same. I documented similar marks around my house,
photographing holes in the walls, scratches following the swing-path of doors,
and grease stains left on the cabinets in the kitchen. Over time I started calling
them residues, thinking of them as the trace left over following a set of prior
events, actions or traumas. A persistent mark remaining, these quiet moments
of residual material memory stood out to me in the ways that they mimicked the
marks of chronic illness left within my body.
I’ve since come to understand my collected body of archives as the residues of
practice, of time spent. As my motivations for creating art are rarely productdriven, I instead seek full engagement within my embodied thinking practice
where art-making offers itself as the ideal tool. While some say that practice
makes perfect, I prefer to look at it as practice makes. In viewing my art as
residues and rejecting the notion of perfection within my making, it is not to say
that my works are not intentional, or that they lack aesthetic decision-making. It
is more so that I have created the right conditions within my practice to generate
results that illustrate a material journey and its accompanying thinking process.
I see these residues as time stamps, as moments within a greater chain of
reactions, a finishing point for one thought and a spark of new beginning for the
next.
In her book, The Creative Process: Learn it and Use it for Life, dancer and
choreographer, Twyla Tharp writes, “There is no one ideal condition for creativity.
What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make
it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling
with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you
want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it.”37 Through my time at Emily
Carr, I have uncovered a way of working that’s made it easier on myself. This is
not to say that I have created an art practice capable of always providing me
with distance from my pain; there are many times that I continue to find myself
35

deep within it. What I do know, however, is that I now hold the tools to help me
sit with my pain and move through it.
Through collaborating with my pain as part of an emergent embodied art practice,
I have come to better understand the ways that it presents within my body. This
has led me to gain insight into how to better communicate my experiences with
pain to others. Through consistently engaging with the practices I’ve built to
conduct my pain studies, the produced residues work together to provide an
inside look into my experiences living with chronic illness and pain. While many
of the drawings, photographs, video stills, collages and written notes could stand
alone as artworks, it is only in conjunction with each other that the full impact of
the process I have been engaged in can be felt. This work has arrived slowly and
continues to arrive as there is no fixed destination. These practices do not end
just because this program does, they move on and continue with me, to fuel the
steps that I take next.
Pain Studies (A Kinder Place) is a durational exhibition that took place in Emily
Carr University’s Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons over the course of 27
days. Housing the furniture, objects, and pain management devices from my
bedroom, 115 drawings, 250 photographs,150 screenshot cell phone notes, and
12 bread-based sculptures created during my time at Emily Carr, as well as my
own physical body, I occupied the space for the duration of the month. Struggling
to curate a single exhibition that reflected the fluidity of an ever-changing
painscape, allowing the installation to remain in motion provided the opportunity
to depict the multifaceted nature of chronic pain. Treating the week provided on
either end for the installation and de-installation of the work as part of the show
itself, I was able to expand the two-week show into a month, allowing for twenty
different iterations to take place during that time.
Having housed the vast majority of the practices and artworks produced over the
course of my two years in grad school, it felt appropriate to begin the exhibition
with the recreation of my bedroom space. Aside from my bed, the show began
with the transportation and reconfiguration of all of the furniture, objects and
pain management devices that made up the contents of my room. Centred within
the gallery, a room comprised of one long wall and two small side walls, the
space resembled a set, stage, or diorama. During my time in the MFA program, I
had begun to consider the body spatially, working with the phrase, “My Body is
a House and I’m Learning to Live in it.” Within this exhibition, I expanded on this
36

idea and began exploring what it meant to merge physical and psychological
spaces through the blurring of internal and external worlds. The pain studies that
had been created over the previous two years were the physical manifestation
of time spent with the sensations of my internal world, they told stories of
different moments with and in pain, mapped the shifting and changing terrains
of my painscape, and communicated the overwhelm of living within chronic pain
through their multitude.

Fig.20: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Utilizing the exhibition as an opportunity for practice, I worked in an emergent way,
curating the artworks into different configurations in an attempt to communicate
both my experiences as a person living with chronic illness and pain, as well as
the processes that I have been engaged in while conducting pain studies. Using
sticky tack to hang the various drawings, photographs and notes, I was able to
efficiently install and take down the various components as I worked.

37

During the exhibition, I exercised the care-based rituals of stretching, movement
and dancing that previously took place within the privacy of my bedroom walls.
Despite the presence of a viewer, I chose to frame these actions for myself
as practicing publicly as opposed to performing for those watching, thus
maintaining the function of each action as a pain management tool within my
greater practice. Now on display for the public to view, these practices were
both an act of vulnerability and defiance; an invitation to bear witness to the
intimate processes required to care for a body with pain and an assertion that
caring for a sick body need not be hidden from the public gaze.

Fig.21: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
38

As the work required long hours spent standing on concrete within the gallery,
it was crucial that I maintained these practices to help mitigate the impact that
I felt within my body. Having pushed past my limits following the first week of
the show, upon reflection, I developed a daily routine to ensure the exhibition
remained physically sustainable.
Beginning each day, I went for a walk, collecting my thoughts on the actions
of the day prior, while easing my body back into motion. A period of reflection,
these walks provided space to begin responding to the public engagement I
had observed the previous day. Writing in my notes app, I reflected on what
each iteration was communicating and which elements needed to be introduced,
modified or rearranged in order to convey that day’s intended message.
From there, I sat by the ocean, allowing myself to slow. As so much of this process
was dependent on fast-paced intuitive decision-making, it was important to
grant myself opportunities to be still. Despite seeming small, this proved to be
one of the most valuable practices I engaged with during the exhibition for it
provided pause, both of body and mind, prior to returning to the gallery space.
On the days that it was raining and this practice was not possible, I found it took
me longer to settle back into my work.

Fig.22: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
39

Upon arriving in the gallery, I would begin engaging in my intuitive stretching
practice, allowing my body to dictate the types and successions of movements
that it required. Massaging rub A535 onto my sore muscles, a scent distinctly
associated with bodily aches, I infused the smell of pain into the gallery space.
Often lasting for an hour or two, this stretching practice was fundamental in
reversing the pain and stiffness that my body held from the day(s) prior. Again,
a period of reflection and sustained slowness, my time spent stretching in the
exhibition allowed me to inhabit the previous day’s installation, formulating a plan
for the next iteration while simultaneously settling back into practicing within the
public eye.
Once complete, I would finally begin working on that day’s installation. Throughout
the duration of the exhibition, the furniture remained a tether to the literal
physical space. Moving around the gallery, different configurations told different
stories. At times, the furniture arrangement resembled the actual layout of my
bedroom that it was referencing. At other moments, it was restricted, forced
onto the footprint of the carpet mimicking the way that pain seizes or laid on
its side, contained below hip height, the part of my body that was currently
giving me the most trouble. I saw the furniture as the backbone to the rest of the
work, it became the set that I inhabited while practicing things like dancing and
stretching, created an environment for the photographs, notes, drawings, and
bread sculptures to engage with, and was an anchor to comfort as the intensity
of pain built.
Upon initially bringing my furniture into the space, I was met with the immediate
response of, “Wow, cute apartment!” from those viewing the work. Despite
continuously adding elements over the course of the first week that upon closer
investigation would have signalled that the work was about pain, I was struck by
its continual invisibility. Drawings depicting my body within pain’s contortions,
photographs and notes tracking its ever-changing frequencies, watercolour lines
and shapes mapping the terrains of my internal world, these pain studies built
and still, people stopped to take selfies in the mirror, posed on the chaise lounge,
smiled and laughed with their friends, and carried on. This was intriguing to me
as it mimicked the isolation that I have often felt when dealing with an invisible
illness. I began exploring installation strategies to see what it would take to clue
viewers in on what the show was about; expanding and contracting the different
elements of the exhibition, laying the mirror on its side in front of my yoga mat to
force those looking to take photographs in its reflection to lay down as well, and
40

finally, building up to the moment where the entire collection of my pain studies
hung on the wall together.
It was at this point of having installed the entirety of my pain studies that I
observed a shift in the way that viewers began to interact with the work. Paired
with a set of large-scale lettered posters reading “My Pain is Alive and Takes
up Space,” I watched as my audience began engaging with the work on a micro
level, no longer simply taking in the composition as a whole. It was here, on the
eleventh iteration of the show, with my pain literally lining the walls of the space
that I inhabited, that the invisibility of pain seemed to shatter and with it, space
was made for moments of connection.

Fig.23: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
41

Leading up to the exhibition, I was unsure about whether or not to engage
with my viewers as they moved through the space. As I rejected the notion of
performance and opted instead for that of practicing publicly, it felt natural to
respond to those seeking discussion around the work. It was through these
conversations that some of the most meaningful moments of my time spent
in the gallery emerged. Conversations around pain, loss, illness and grief are
rarely had between strangers, yet through creating a space to offer mine to the
public, I was met with theirs in return. It was in these moments of connective
communication that I was reminded of art’s ability to position us to one another.
To be seen in my pain, and to have others feel seen in theirs meant the work had
done its job.

Fig.24: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

At the halfway point of the show, I began introducing elements that spoke to the
second portion of the exhibition’s title, A Kinder Place. As the twelfth iteration,
I built a blanket fort around the furniture tucked into the corner of the gallery; a
hideout from pain. Over the course of the next few days, I spent time drawing,
playing ukulele and singing, reading and napping within the privacy that it offered.
On the fourteenth day, I hung a series of photographs of clouds and blue skies
surrounding the fort, a disruption expanding beyond the line of pain studies still
hung at hip height. A signal of optimism, it was through these simple actions that
I hoped to suggest that even in the depths of pain, reprieve could be found.
42

Fig.25: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Upon completing the day’s iteration, I ended each session of work with dancing.
Whether in the gallery space or in my now empty bedroom, intuitive movement
once again served as an opportunity to reconnect with my body and slow down. An
outlet for emotional expression, at times these dances were joyous, a celebration
of all of the things my body is capable of. Other times, however, following the
movement my body asked for led to the release of stored pain. On one of the
evenings, while dancing particularly hard within the gallery, I was flooded with
emotion and instinctually began ripping at the lettered posters reading “My Pain
is Alive and Takes up Space” before ending up in a heap, crying on the gallery
floor. Taken off guard by my display of raw and unfiltered pain, I took a moment
to compose myself before looking up at the wall which now read, “My Pain is
Alive.” The poignancy of this residual phrase, left following an unplanned burst
of emotive action, was one of many moments that encouraged me to continue
allowing myself to be guided by gut-based embodied knowledge. In lacking the
time to question whether or not these types of actions were correct, and instead,
trusting that I could reflect and respond to the conditions as they changed, at
times, it was as though the work was alive and I had become the tool that it
emerged though.

43

Fig.26: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

Fig.27: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
44

During the final days of the show, I introduced my bread-based sculptures to the
exhibition, creating a third rendition of Help or Hinder Hard to Say. Now more
than a year and a half old, some of the pieces crumbling, brittle and worn out,
the bread rested amongst equally tired pain management devices. Burnt-out
heating pads and torn wheat bags with their scorched kernels from countless
microwave sessions spilled and resting, they lay, supported by the furniture they
inhabited in their working days. Once posed upon white plinths, sat within the
stark, clean cube of the gallery, this third iteration of the work offered comfort to
tired forms as they adorned the domestic space they now found themselves in.

Fig.28: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

A brittle, thread-mended loaf sat centred on the coffee table, resting between
two bouquets of tulips in varied stages of decay. Under the warm glow of
my bedroom lamp, surrounded by fallen petals, this composition served as a
reminder; despite the care that we provide, clinging to the idea of preservation
is an unattainable and needless goal. This notion of breaking down as a point of
potential, a reoccurring theme seen through many lenses within the entirety of
my thesis exhibition, once again offers the opportunity for metamorphosis as
a resistance to the impulse to cling to things as they once were. Whether the
building up of drawings to be torn down the next day to express a new idea,
bread as a medium that all but promises to decay, the corners of drawings, now
slightly crumpled and less pristine than when they entered the gallery or the
45

wear now present on my furniture, returned to my room upon the completion of
the exhibition, these things tell the stories of an event, a life, of something that
once happened. A residual tradeoff to have lived in motion, perhaps the value of
the work lives in its recognition of its own temporality.
In one final moment of serendipity, upon wanting to create a second set of
lettered posters reading, “Taking Care of a Sick Body is an Art,” I realized that
the phrase contained the exact amount of letters as its predecessor, “My Pain is
Alive and Takes up Space.” Flipping over the now crumpled and torn posters, I
drew out the new letters on the reverse side. Hung beside a column of nineteen
photographs of the previous iterations that took place within the space, this final
installment of Pain Studies (A Kinder Place) was the meta-reflection of both the
work that had taken place within the gallery over the course of the month as well
as the development of a sustainable art practice that I had been engaged over
the two years prior. It is not an exaggeration to say that embarking on the process

Fig.29: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023
46

of creating this lived art practice has transformed my relationship with pain. In
acknowledging the care required to maintain my health as an art in and of itself,
it has granted me the freedom to dissolve the illusion of perceived stagnancy
within a diagnosis of chronic. Instead, my journey with health remains in motion.
No longer seeking an arrival, I work instead, to build a kinder place. One of many,
perpetual in motion, inside and outside of myself, the work is never finished. In
letting art be the tool used to direct my living, I continue to move, in the general
direction of forward.
Beginning her career as a commercial photographer, Jo Spence developed
the technique of ‘photo therapy’ upon her diagnosis of breast cancer.38 Using
photography as a therapeutic method to gain agency over the disease that she
was battling, Spence’s photographs document and make visible the private
experience of navigating sickness and play out a reenacted personal history as a
means of revisiting and releasing one’s self from traumatic life experiences.
In The Final Project, a collaboration with Terry Dennett, Spence documented
the process of dying from cancer over the course of two years. In Sandwiched
Portraits 3 a portrait of Spence taken from her previous archive is superimposed
with images of natural decay, seeming to suggest a process of returning to
nature.39 Standing in for her own image in many of the other photographs
within this series, Spence staged skeletons in wigs, holding cameras, posing in
graveyards and closed shop windows as a sort of auto-therapeutic investigation
into her own dying.”40 Perhaps most striking, when viewing Spence’ archive of
photographs following her terminal diagnosis is the playful approach she took to
embodying her illness even in the face of death. With her ability to reconstruct the
narrative around life’s hardest things as something only to be suffered, Spence
reminds us that within pain, lies many other things as well.

Fig. 30: Jo Spence, The Final Project, Various 7, 1991-1992
Figure Removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a photograph
of Spence’s “The Final Project, Various 7” where a skeleton can be seen hanging in a
storefront with a ‘closed’ sign across its abdomen https://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/gallery/2016/feb/16/photographer-jo-spence-the-final-project
47

I’ve heard hope referred to as a discipline and have come to recognize joy as
something to be practiced. I have found that the more playful the approach that
I can bring to my time spent with pain, the more success I have in transforming
it into something else. “Some people might ask, why choose to feel?”41 writes
Alta Starr. “Why choose aliveness and presence when that means choosing to
be awake not only to joy but also to pain? […] By welcoming the difficult no less
wholeheartedly than the delightful, you can come back to life.”42 By using art as
a tool to sit with pain, I’ve come to observe a strange phenomenon; the further
that I’ve allowed myself to look within pain’s depths, the higher my capacity for
creating joy within them.

Fig.31: Pain Studies (A Kinder Place), 2023

48

REFERENCES
1

Melzack, Ronald. “The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major Properties and
Scoring Methods.” Pain 1.3 (1975): 277-299.

2

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Oxford University Press, 1985, New York, 5.

3

“Dead Metaphor.” Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/
dictionary/dead%20metaphor. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

4

Tajcnar, Rhonda. Personal Communication, Aug. 2022.

5

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
1985, 5.

6

Ibid.

7

Olstein, Lisa. Pain Studies. Bellevue Literary Press, 2020, New York, 15.

8

Biss, Eula. “The Pain Scale.” Harper’s Magazine, Jun 2005, 26.

9

Antoni, Janine. Janine Antoni Immaculate Conceptions Inc. http://www.
janineantoni.net/biocv. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

10

Antoni, Janine. “Lick and Lather.” Janine Antoni Immaculate Conceptions
Inc. http://www.janineantoni.net/#/lick-and-lather. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

11

12

Ibid.
Wheeler, Eugenie G. & Dace-Lombard, Joyce. Living Creatively with
Chronic Illness. Pathfinder Pub, 1989, Atlanta.

13

Fournier, Lauren. Lauren Fournier, https://laurenfournier.net/Autotheory.
Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

14

Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and
Criticism. MIT Press, 2021, Massachusetts, 2.
49

15

Ibid. 3

16

Olstein, Lisa. Pain Studies. Bellevue Literary Press, 2020, 108.

17

Ibid.

18

“Carmen Papalia: Long Time No See.” Cue Art Foundation. https://
cueartfoundation.org/carmen-papalia. Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.

19

Papalia, Carmen. “An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts.” Canadianart.
https://canadianart.ca/essays/access-revived. Jan. 2018, accessed 26
Feb. 2023.

20

Ibid.

21

Ibid.

22

Ibid.

23

Ibid.

24

Quabeck, Nina. “Intent in the Making: The Life of Zoe Leonard’s ‘Strange
Fruit’.” Burlington Contemporary. https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/
journal/journal/intent-in-the-making-the-life-of-zoe-leonards-strangefruit. May 2019, accessed 26 Sept. 2022.

25

Ibid.

26

Blume, Anna. “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume,” Zoe Leonard,
Exhibition catalogue from the Vienna Secession 23.7-14.9, 1997.

27

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006, Durham
and London, 1.

28

Ibid., 57.

29

Ibid., 15-16.
50

30

Gray, Peter. “What Exactly is Play, and Why is it such a Powerful Vehicle for
Learning?.” Topics in Language Disorders 37.3 (2017): 222-223.

31

“Mobile”. Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
dead%20metaphor. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

32

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006, 7.

33

Starr, Alta. “Cultivating the Self: Embodied Transformation for Artists.”
Making and Being. Embodiment, Collaboration, and Circulation in the Visual
Arts. edited by Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard. Pioneer Works Press,
2020, New York, 58.

34

Ibid.

35

Papalia, Carmen. “An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts.” Canadianart.
https://canadianart.ca/essays/access-revived. Jan. 2018, accessed 26
Feb. 2023.

36

“Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem, From the Collections
of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.” Esker Foundation, https://
eskerfoundation.com/exhibition/louise-bourgeois/. Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.

37

Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Process: Learn it and Use it for Life. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2003, 17.

38

“Jo Spence.” Richard Saltoun. https://www.richardsaltoun.com/artists/36jo-spence/biography. Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.

39

Boyer, Anne. “The Kind of Pictures She Would Have Taken: Jo Spence.”
Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Inquiry 42.1 (2016): 6.

40

Ibid. 5.

41

Starr, Alta. “Cultivating the Self: Embodied Transformation for Artists.”
Pioneer Works Press, 2020, 48.

42

Ibid. 49.
51