Self-Home

Boxer room expresses emotion through the practice of somatics and identifying spaces in the body that hold information.  The body is built out in the positions of a dancer.  Like ballet, movement in this body is fluid yet trapped.  It moves around within its container until it has permission to be released through the boxing gloves.  The body is invited to move with the resistance rather than against it.  As information dances throughout the body, it delivers different enlightenments on how the body survived and how it exists in the description of PTSD. 

There are memories of relationships that did and didn’t.  There are memories of those that stood beside me and those that walked away.  There are moments of truth that can’t be hidden and layers of materials that create an alternate image to the one imagined by others.

 

The flowers are made from shipping boxes used to deliver hellos and bits of home to faraway places. Old tights stretch and tear from the nails that enter the body over time. The journey in this body has been one of overuse, abuse, and pushing. The walls of the room are filled with journal pages, viewers' writings, and paintings that allowed release when the bodies canvas could no longer hold the images.

 

Self-Separated

The pain of the dancer on the dance floor, torturing her body to do things it refuses.  There is a sadistic attraction to the pushing and tearing of one's muscles. It becomes an addiction to going to a space where there is danger, pretending to flee to free pain while simultaneously being drowned in it.

The work is created on personal clothing, “work clothes”.  This is part one, the meeting of my husband, 9/11 when his role in the military changed, and my observations of myself, our marriage, and my children.  The women’s face displays expectations of patriotism, beauty, disgust, violence, and escape.

 

This one-piece is called 1991 because that is the year, I graduated from high school protesting the Gulf War that my soon-to-be husband, whom I hadn’t met yet, would later serve in.