Resonance

Links to:

Installation with Body Sculpture

Patient-Doctor-Caregiver Collaborative Videos

Artist's Book

Resonance is a digital media installation divided into two intertwining halves. Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences, and internally, it explores how cancer can spark a resonance between the artist and their own creative voice. In addition to the artist’s own sculptural and sound work, the piece includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who provided creative writing, visual artwork, and sound for collaborative videos, as credited therein.

 As the title suggests, this piece is primarily about connection and communication: in particular, this piece explores how patients, doctors, and caregivers creatively resonate with one another, and how the artist resonates with their own thoughts, emotions, and physical body. My goal through this work is to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. 

The external aspect of the piece involves the ten collaborative videos created from the artwork of the thirty patients, medical providers, and caregivers who participated in the project.  Over the course of two years I facilitated a series of art-making workshops, starting with creative writing workshops with patients, then bringing their work to doctors and medical students unrelated to their treatment, who created visual art in response. Finally I brought this visual art (sans the writing) to a group of unrelated caregivers, who responded to the visuals with sound art. I then combined each set of three artworks into one collaborative video, fusing the different media into an overall piece which represents how these three groups’ shared experience of healthcare are inextricably connected and resonate with one another, yet each have their own unique perspective. 

Internally, I also explored the concept of resonance on a personal level via my treatment and remission from a stage IV cancer diagnosis. Through this aspect of the project, I examined how I continue to communicate with my own cancer, a source of poetic and artistic inspiration which led me from an engineering career to my current MFA program. I seek deeper understanding of this fellow co-habitant of mine, to hear its voice, which resonates with my own, and to look to the cancer as a type of muse: a source of destruction which acts like fire, bringing the light of inspiration as it consumes. I engaged in readings, meditation, and free writing to come into contact with the cancer’s voice, then directly addressed the cancer via personal letters, feeding these words into a Python program I developed which remixes my words into the cancer’s response. Just as the cancer essentially remixes my own cells to build itself, the program uses only my own words to reflect the cancer’s voice and its responses to me. 

Finally, I created a plaster-cast sculpture of my own body, in the position which I use to receive my scans, containing 16 holes in all of the locations where I originally had cancer. Within each hole is a speaker playing my voice at different pitches, reading the cancer’s responses from the Python program. Hanging above the sculpture is a divinatory pendulum (a djed, based on the ancient Egyptian symbol for the spine of Osiris) made of yew wood, suspended by a platinum wire. This pendulum represents not only the divinatory aspects of the scans I receive, which help to determine my life and future, but also my treatment, as platinum is the source of cisplatin, and yew the source of taxol, the two chemotherapy drugs I received. The sculpture literally resonates with my and the cancer’s voices, surrounded by the external resonance of the patient-doctor-caregiver collaborations I have created. 

Accompanying the installation is an artist's book describing the research and process of development for the work.  This book is in the shape of a caduceus, the well-known symbol of medicine consisting of two serpents twined about a central staff, topped by wings.  The content is presented in an unusual format; all sections of the book appear on each page.  To read each section, one must continue page by page reading only that aspect of the shape (for example, reading only the wings on each page), then return to the beginning to read the next section contained in another aspect (one of the serpents), etc. The book thus represents the ways that all aspects of the project resonate with one another.