If These Feet Could Fly, 2025
A.P.E. Gallery at Northampton Center for the Arts
33 Hawley St, Northampton, MA
In 2019, after a rapid decline in my health, I was diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. With multi-system illnesses and spine injuries affecting my hand function, my usual way of painting became untenable; I taped paper to the floor and used my feet as paint brushes. Suddenly, I was a nomad in my own life.
By making marks informed by functional movements and music, this dance between what is injured and what is free becomes a practice in reintegrating a fragmented mind and body. While my body deteriorates in real time, the hopes my past-self had for my future evaporate. Over time the question “how do I get well?” changed to “how do I live with pain and illness as companions?”
While working on this collection, I was hit by a car, sustaining a traumatic brain injury. My life, however tragically it sometimes unfolds, continues to become more and more precious; a limitless body is not a gift.
If These Feet Could Fly is a collection of paintings made with my feet exploring answers to this question: What happens when the body deteriorates in new and unexpected ways before the heart is ready?
My body is decomposing quicker than I can write down the recipe to reverse. Please don’t ever let me stop falling in love: with people, places, the mundane and ordinary, but even more so with what’s left of my broken body and shattered heart and all the ways these pieces can still be reorganized into a mosaic of a life well lived. With paint on my feet, I document it permanently.
