Mikayla Swartz, Decomposed Monument, Lithograph, 70 x 50cm, 2024, Framed
All three of these works were a part of my investigation last year on the effect of trauma on the body. Traumatic wounds are often known to be unspeakable, yet we still find ways to disclose them. In my work, I repeatedly include used pillows, regarding a pillow as a surrogate for my body. This intimate object is familiar, known, close to the body, comforting, and even scented with the body. These used pillows are cut, picked, exposed, mutilated, and pulled apart, alluding to similar experiences of trauma occurring in and on the body. In mutilating these soft bodies, violence and repeated traumatic pain is explored. In conversation with the pillow as a surrogate, a repetitive process occurs when one cuts into and mutilates the pillow. Often, a trauma survivor is locked in a state of repetition compulsion, to recuperate, in the controlled context of symbolic behaviour, a readiness to feel anxiety. This compulsion leads to the consumption of self, becoming a mirror of how the trauma has affected my body. Within my practical research, hands become paradoxical in their duality of being both violent and gentle. Hands, and to their extension humans, can both preserve and ruin. In my work, I acknowledge the duality of being. Hands are equated to consuming and destructive acts being implied in my works. A distorted power dynamic is at play between the hands, as the potential perpetrator, and the pillow as the potential victim. However, the pillow in my work also refers to the self, similar to the hands. This negotiation between ‘characters’ in the work unfolds as an inner turmoil and untimely an act of consuming the self. Seeking to understand and further expose the chiasm within this paradox. Within my lithographic works, the hands are seemingly gentle and investigative, but the longer you look, the more you see the destruction that has already been caused by them, with the overflowing and disintegrated stuffing, to the tense pulling caused by the wound yarn. The wound caused by trauma is stubborn, taking a corporeal form within the body. The riffling through of the pillow insinuates how I riffle through myself in order to create these works, and further, how destructive this process may be. I want the viewer to start feeling as though the hands become their own, further, causing this feeling by using a first-person perspective.