My intent with this work was to explore the questions I have asked myself following pivotal events in my personal history about how those events changed the person I became.  These questions had an ambiguous effect on my ability to process trauma – whilst they were an attempt at understanding, they ultimately kept me harnessed in time to those events.

But this work is also about the post-Enlightenment drive to categorise, to define, in the pursuit for ontological understanding.  Trauma has become an object for “therapeutic” examination and interpretation, to create a clean hygiene layer to prevent contamination between the personal and the societal, between messy, bodily, leaking psychic processes and the rational mind. In Barbara Creed’s words: “to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability...”

The essay “Count Your Blessings” was written to accompany this work and is linked below.