If These Feet Could Fly, 2026
AVA Gallery, 11 Bank St, Lebanon, NH
In 2019, after a rapid decline in my health, I was diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder, Hypermobile 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.
While working on this collection, in 2024, I was hit by a car as a pedestrian which left me with craniocervical instability and a traumatic brain injury. Now living with intractable migraine and a fraction of the cognitive battery I had before, I spend much of my day resting my injured brain in a dark, quiet room. Through painting and writing, I resurrect what is left of me, grieve what is lost, and let my work and the memories loved ones have of me reshape me into something that can be made legible again. My life, however tragically it sometimes unfolds, continues to become more and more precious; a limitless body would not be a gift.
Making marks with a body in pain and in neurological decline while listening to music becomes a dance between what is injured and what is free; it is a practice of 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?”
If These Feet Could Fly is a collection of paintings made with my feet exploring answers to these questions: What happens when the body deteriorates in new and unexpected ways before the heart is ready? How do you learn to love the thing that you most wished hadn’t happened? How do you live a meaningful life when wounded beyond repair? And how do you grieve who you used to be and learn to love a new version of yourself?
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, and 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.
Windows to Better Days
Acrylic on paper-based material
I crafted these “shoes” made from repurposed framing mats and cardstock “sandal straps” so they slip on and off my feet to create larger marks than my feet alone could make. When painting with my hands, I use different size brushes and tools to create variation, depth, and a dynamic composition. My feet are like two identical paint brushes; while I also use just my toe and heel to make smaller marks, these “shoes” provide a way to add more variation.
The “shoes” are also artifacts; they contain unconsciously created marks antithetic to some of the more intentional choices made when painting. Saving them is one way of illuminating unconscious movements and desires, which are the driving force behind our feelings, actions, and patterns.
An essential skill to living meaningfully with chronic pain and illness is creating windows through the suffering that give enough reason to endure it. Windows are the liminal space between here and there, between the present moment and the future we imagine for ourselves, and between what we long for and what we fear. Fear can dictate how we color our perception of self, other, past, and future, but so can hope. These are windows to a hopeful future that may or may not exist but that we must believe in if we wish to feel connected to the present and see new horizons in the future.
What Happened
What happened to your body?
Have you ever seen a bird fly into a window?
Nobody asks, What do you remember?
Being knocked loose from my body
Splayed out in the grass and not caring how I had arrived
Feeling what it is to perfectly fit and letting go
The firefighter cutting my pants to the knee to expose a laceration
The inability to lift my head and bear my weight
My body becoming a crime scene
Being cut out of my clothes to a cacophony of organized voices
The whirr of the CT machine and lying in my own urine
Bright lights and more pairs of hands than I could count
Feeling like a child and wanting my mum
Nobody asks, how did you survive?
I revisit the scene of the crime looking for a remedy that will rewrite a different ending
I collect the seeds of a scattered dandelion fluff
trying to fit them back together into a perfect sphere so nothing slips
This is the truth I do not want to tell:
one day I left home and returned, broken beyond repair
When I have exhausted all attempts at reversal,
I let the seeds pirouette into the wind
This is what I want to say when asked, what happened?
Will there be more growth than death?
Will I remember enough of myself to become something that I still recognize?
What if I cannot make this irreparable damage beautiful again?
How do I know if I’m making the right mess?
I am sick with questions.
This is how I know death wouldn’t have been a kindness
Each question, the beginning of a resolve,
sprouting through growing pains, photosynthesizing for the first time,
remembering what it is to become entirely undone
and metamorphose into something new—
awkward and unfamiliar—
that still opens
