Ragged directions
To inhabit an unpredictable body is risky, to inhabit an unpredictable body pushes you outside of the confines of expected behavior, it makes you a risky prospect for employers. My body jerks and moves in ways I cannot always control, or a limb that worked fine one day will suddenly give way without warning. I am trying with my work to consider the opportunities that a leftfield body can offer too, not just the threats. When I stimm and mark make, when I listen to the compulsions of the flexions of my muscles, I open up new conversations. Simple conversations of the body in motion responding to the material resistance of the substrate of the paper and more complex conversations that tell of the struggle of masking these movements to fit in.
I have started to enjoy the aesthetics that the ragged directions of my pen make as well as the stimulating feedback I get from responding to the compulsive motor tics my body makes. I recognize something of myself in them. 80 percent of communication exists outside of the verbal and perceptual channel, and in these lines are all my missing bits, the bits that don’t get let out in meetings.
My friend recently described my drawings as having ragged directions. I liked it a lot, there is value in the uncertainty. Poetry and the use of language outside of conceived expectations disrupts but it also creates possibility for new meaning.
