Cell Dance

My recent health struggle with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is an exploration of my body’s experience of hope, fear and despair as I navigate daily chronic pain. My body becomes a framework for me to use paint to explore gesture, form and color through my experience of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). The mobility in my body can be limited in range through the right side, especially in my thumb and fingers, neck and feet and I use this experience to create layers of color, gestural marks and abstracted forms that are specific to my body’s abilities each time I’m in the studio. People with EDS face a daily struggle with the thinning of the proteins and collagens that hold their bones in place; joints painfully slip out of place as the glue that holds them together thins. And for this reason, my work is a ritualistic process of countering this thinning, this disappearing, by adding layer upon layer of thick paint to each panel. Each composition appears beyond ornamentation and carries the life force of color, line and texture in bright candy colors carved with old clay tools. It’s a cacophony of vibrant intuition. A force that can only be made by being present to the pain and bittersweetness of life as I navigate through each day with EDS.