A new beginning!

It has been simply ages since I posted an update here!  Whilst I have continued to make much art, albeit much less in Covidtimes, I haven’t been sharing it much online. This is probably because using online spaces has become much more difficult for me in recent years. One of my quirks is a condition called Vestibular Syndrome. It is often associated with brain injury, and it has unfortunately got much worse over the past 5 years (possibly triggered by undertaking a medical trial of TMS…but that is another story!) 

For me, Vestibular Syndrome expresses itself as nausea and dizziness, and is often triggered by online spaces, especially if they have many moving parts. It has been a real shit! Especially as we entered Covid and almost everything went online!

This, combined with increased chronic fatigue and chronic pain, in large part due to ongoing difficulties accessing health care and support due to covid, has also greatly impacted my mental health. Things have been very messy at times over the past 2 years!

 

But I have had some recent small overall improvements. And I am getting better at practicing having more realistic expectations of my actual 'Envelope of Energy' (also called 'spoons' in the chronic illness community).

 

So there may be a few more updates of my creative practice in the near future!

 

For now, I will share this relatively recent linocut. Close Encounters of the Vestibular Kind. This artwork has had quite a long journey to completion. I began carving in 2019. I proofed it in March 2020, just before we went into lockdown. I then managed to do little bits of work to complete the carving here and there. And in January 2022 this year, almost 2 years later, I was finally able to complete and edition it.

 

It is now an edition of 26. And is finally now available to purchase. Please contact me if you are interested. 

It is part of new collection of work, most of which are still in slow progress!

Close Encounters of the Vestibular Kind, linocut, 21cm x 21cm

 

This small linocut references my experiences of living with chronic illness in our contemporary capitalist world that values production and ability over rest and disability. This works also refers to the Vestibular Syndrome that I live with, that causes dizziness and nausea, often exacerbated by poor design of online spaces. 

This linocut was proofed in March 2020, as most of Australia first started responding to Covid 19 and isolating. I, alongside many other disabled people, quickly realised that this experience of isolation is something that we well know and have developed strong skills around managing. But instead of having opportunities to share our knowledge, we were mislabelled as vulnerable. And with that one word, disabled people have been re-stereotyped as needing of help, erasing the complexity of our lives, and making our lived experience wisdom unable to be understood.