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 known universe, and ultimately recombined. Struggling with the ongoing feelings of consternation engendered by the various brief pyschosis produced by childbirth, I adopted the unmaking and remaking of my 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 a 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.