I worked on a collaborative project with Shona, focused on expressive mark making as a representation of the lived experience, the quantified self, after seeing the work of Laurie Frick and Lucy Kimbell. For a week, each of us responded to our physical or mental state with gestural responses. At the end of the week, we swapped work - digitally - and responded to each others’ work.
Shona’s pieces captured the physical pain of her condition, and I found them quite traumatic. My instinct was to try to ‘contain’ the pain somehow, and this led me to look at medical charts, ways the profession tries - inadequately - to quantify and record patients’ pain. The resulting pieces are visual expressions that convey the impossibility of containing pain in numbers, graphs, and neat little charts.
