I’m very honoured to have two pieces included in this year’s Opulent Mobility show! Opulent Mobility is an international annual exhibit that asks artists to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. It imagines a world where disability is celebrated instead of denied, ignored, and feared. These exhibits are curated by founder A. Laura Brody and disability arts activist and photographer Anthony Tusler and include art and artworks from across the country and around the globe.
Continue readingCategory Archives: anatomy
the wandering ghost
I completed my largest embroidery to date—the wandering ghost—in June. The stitched area is 53 x 21 cm (21 x 8.5 inches).
Clean up took a lot more time than usual because the chalk pencil I used was especially stubborn to wash out of the cotton and I wanted to wet block instead of iron it which took a bit of figuring out since that’s a new process for me. But it is done! Aside from cleanup I worked on it from June 14, 2023 to June 12, 2024. An entire year.
Read on for more about my process for this piece.
Continue readingSciArt September 2024
I’ve been participating in SciArt September for a few years now. Glendon Mellow and Liz Butler came up with some excellent prompts yet again this year, each week on a different theme: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, folklore, and the end. I shared older work based on all the daily prompts.
Continue readingNov ’23 to Feb ’24: Renewal and Propagation
It’s been a challenging three months. Winter is always hard on my system and I’ve been getting all my vaccines up to date which has required a fair bit of recovery time. I also found out my cyborg part (an iliac vein stent) needs an adjustment so I’m waiting for a date for day surgery. But, because creative work is what makes me flourish, I’ve done a surprising amount of work in that time.
In December I realized that my routines weren’t working well and were causing me a lot of unnecessary internal urgency so I totally scrapped them and rebuilt them from scratch. It took about a month of trial and error but I now have routines that work so much better for where I’m at cognitively, physically, and with my current projects. My music work is a bit more spaced out now, as is my journaling, but the internal striving and pressure I felt with my old routines is gone.
I do think the impetus for such a large shift is due to my continuing research on the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory. Urgency activates the sympathetic (stress, fight, flight) system, and reducing that means I can come back to ventral vagal (calm and engaged) much more readily which is very good for my entire system.
Embroidery WIPs
Continue readingMonthlyish Update: Getting Guts in Order (late Sept to early Nov)
Note: This has been cross-posted on my ko-fi. There are a few other monthly updates there if you would like to read back a few months.
Webinar Report
Another monthly-ish update and another very full month. The main creative work on my plate was teaching a webinar for CHASE Medical Humanities about the visualization process I use to create my symptomatology pieces as well as how to use the poetic technique of homophonic translation to re-vision and re-own dense scientific texts.
It felt good to stretch my teaching muscles again. I’ve been teaching in some capacity since my late teens—music, yoga, and meditation—but had to stop when I got sick in 2015. Despite an ME/CFS crash the day before, I was well enough to present my webinar and the participants seemed to enjoy and get a lot out of the work. A few people even shared their symptomatology image/test pieces on social media. Here are a few:
Gillian Blekkenhorst started with a trachea and expanded their piece from there.
website: https://blekkenhorst.ca/
Twitter: @gblekkenhorst
Webinar: The Invisible Made Visible
I’m teaching a free webinar with CHASE Medical Humanities in the UK on Thursday, 26 October 2023, 5:30pm UK time, 10:30 am SK time. I’ll be leading participants through my process for creating both the visual and textual aspects of my symptomatology pieces. I’m very excited about it!
You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-invisible-made-visible-a-visualization-writing-workshop-with-lia-pas-tickets-726765173197
This webinar is open to all, not just people in CHASE institutions. For the institution question in the registration I usually put n/a, and my position as independent artist.
Continue readingSciArt September 2023
I’ve been participating in SciArt September for a few years now. Glendon Mellow and Liz Butler came up with some excellent prompts yet again this year, and I shared older work based on the prompts. Below are all 30 days of my posts!
Day 1: starry
stars within, stars without (2017) is part of my symptomatology embroidery series. This is a map of the paresthesias (tingling) in my upper body due to ME/CFS, stitched as I experienced them.
A Book, A Card, An Aria, A Teaching
My contributor copies of Sharp Notions arrived and it is a stunningly gorgeous book. It’s hefty and printed on full colour glossy stock.
Continue readingtethered by fluid and ligaments (2023)
I have completed my liver embroidery. It’s another large piece, H 15″ x W 21″ (38 × 53 cm). I stitched it from 20 June 2022 to 5 June 2023. I’ve titled it tethered by fluid and ligaments.
Unlike some of my previous symptomatology pieces, my liver issues haven’t been resolved during the stitching of this piece. . . .
Continue readingA Cover, A Critique, A Map, A Mention
Sharp Notions Cover Reveal
The cover for the forthcoming anthology, Sharp Notions: Writing From The Stitching Life, was revealed in February, and it features my embroidery, she breathed!
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