Of Wounds and irritations
soft clay, 35x35cm
Our minds and hearts are excellent in concealing pain, but our bodies are truthful and telling.I recreated physical and emotion wounds found on my body with clay and aligned them in a clock. The wounds are ordered by their age; how long they’ve been on my body for. 12 o’clock starts at the minute irritation of scratching an itch, to 3 o’clock pimples, 7 o-clock stretchmarks and 8 o’clock acne that reminds me of being bullied as a teen. These accidents on my body are visually similar, yet when placing significant scars from my car crash next to an annoying mosquito bite, it rephrases the emotional trauma within me. I think we learn to nullify the pain of past wounds overtime because it is easier to cope, just as we can block out the rhythmically intrusive sounds of a loud clock until it sits quietly in the background. Since we are so capable of hiding pain, often the pain never really leaves even if we think we are healed. Sometimes we can be preoccupied on what appears to hurt the most, like a bruise, when we are ignoring what really hurts more on the other end of the clock’s hand. Time does heal, but not without our help. Our bodies are scarred because wounds of the past still shapes our presents. The pain I once experienced can be so strong that it becomes a part of who I am, and the part of me who’s been hurt can resurface just as the clock revisits each hour naturally.
There is a cyclical nature of experiencing pain, of throbbing simultaneously everywhere and we should not be shameful of suffering. It is more dangerous to pretend traumatic pasts stay as history, isolated from today, than to revisit this pain front on when the hour comes. In order to truly heal, we must see a clock that weaves together the past, present and future tense of hurt.
This idea came about as I kept revisiting on how we want to speed up everything except for forgetting. Yet this sits in reverse when it comes to forgetting pain.