Out of the Furrow

In the days and weeks following the birth of my child, I experienced a variety of delusions and brief psychoses. One such event was a belief that my body had been separated into all of its individual atoms, subsequently spread evenly across the universe, and ultimately recombined.

Struggling with the ongoing feelings of terror engendered by the various pyschoses produced by childbirth, I adopted the unmaking and remaking of the body in my delusion as a way to process and “sort myself back out” emotionally. Each work in the Out of the Furrow series uses information from the periodic table for the eleven elements comprising over 99% of the human body in the proportion that they occur. Each piece therefore represents a different arrangement of my body, depicting a sense of self that is scattered, fractured, and recombined. The series approaches psychosis as an alienation of an individual’s understanding of themselves in relation to the material world as well as a disruption in the subjective experience of the flow of time. The resulting simultaneous, yet vastly incomplete, representations of my body depict “self” as a permanently fluctuating apparatus that is porous and always impacted by material and affective environments.

By depicting a human body as a group of briefly related things, the series reveals the ways in which lived experience can exceed the rigor of current archival and scientific processes.