(un)becoming

MFA Graduating Exhibition 

Fifth Parallel Gallery - Regina, SK 
November 14-25, 2022

 

Exhibition Statement: 
 

(un)becoming is the material evidence of my embodied trauma. It is the result of a two-year exploration of and coming to terms with trauma’s effects on my body and its accompanying shame. In 2020, I pulled all the clothing from my closet and began to cut and tear every piece apart. When I looked at the contents of my closet, I did not see clothing. I saw armour that no longer offered protection and skins I had outgrown. I heard echoes of stories that no longer felt true. I sensed the weight of hoarded impressions absorbed in the fabrics. The closet was a material and emotional archive of past memories and selves. Looking inside was like confronting the abject aspects of myself in the space where secrets are stored and shame is conceived.
 

Surveying the damage, I decided to sew the fragments together. I attached the ends of the long, stitched strips lengthwise into a tubular casing. In an attempt to structure the chaos, I kept shades of colours together—pinks with pinks, orange with orange, blues with blues. Next, I stuffed the sheath with poly-fil from pillows, and “Worm” (2020–22) emerged. Fifteen years of clothing were transformed from familiar garments into an unfamiliar object. With each new meter of stuffed fabric, the form became more animate. Two years later, while “Worm” remains sprawled across the floor of the exhibition space, my closet is empty of clothes and their embodied memories. “Worm” is my transitional object, my trauma memorialized, my reparative motif, my companion.
 

(un)becoming challenges conventional narrative-driven methods in trauma-related art. Psychoanalysis, the legal system, talk shows, and other forms of contemporary narratology condition audiences to fetishize trauma’s originating event as an eventual site of excavation and closure. I am not interested in testimony, but in trauma’s expressions in and from my body and ultimately, the body shared with my audience. The exhibition is a material disclosure. It contains and reveals secrets, questioning the boundaries between the two. It seeks to transform the audience’s desire to “know” another’s trauma, its causes or perpetrators. Instead, it offers possibilities of knowing trauma in a way that is resonant, embodied, intersubjective and always in a state of (un)becoming.