Daily Nodes Day 22 2023/UnravelBroken 2021
Pen and ink/digital paired with ceramic mixed media sculpture
In 2016 I was invited to participate in a group show where we randomly picked three words to establish a theme, sort of a contemporary Dada gesture. The words "Whole, Phantasmagoria, and Duality" gave me the chance to create some new iconography illustrating my frustrations living with Multiple Sclerosis. I started to draw little pen and ink pieces in my sketchbook to use as illustrations in a sculptural book that would be shown. One of the icons came from a male nude drawing that I had visually stabbed with a needle. This pin prick was symbolic of many things: Pain, Terminus (the end of the Male Nude series), artifact and specimen collecting. It began to appear in a lot of work afterwards. After 2019, the sculptural work also included a broken grid that was created from old shredded prints. The grid, unraveling, symbolized the loss of control. I think it also represented the loss of memory and the gaps in thinking.
A fellow printmaker had introduced me to a Jelaluddin Rumi Poem about Body Intelligence:
Your intelligence is always with you,
overseeing your body, even though
you may not be aware of its work.
If you start doing something
against your health, your intelligence
will eventually scold you.
The throbbing vein
will take you further
than any thinking.
Observe the wonders as the occur around you.
Do not claim them. Feel the artistry
Moving through, and be silent.
From “A Year with Rumi” translated by Coleman Barks.
In April 2023, I suffered another MS attack. The Rumi poem was reminding me, it’s time to listen to my body intelligence. I began to draw each night that I experienced. The following morning, I wrote about the image. The “Daily Nodes” drawings and the journaling were exercises in healing, both with eye/hand coordination and writing. A node is a point at which lines or pathways intersect. The metaphor of connecting points develops in my daily art journaling. In this, I am recording my healing process after a major Multiple Sclerosis (MS) attack that has left me with ongoing debilitating symptoms.
