Cover to uncover
I block out the words in Cobain’s journals that do not relate to my personal experience. Sifting through the text, I read to find answers to the ultimate question: “Why did he leave me?” It is a laborious process of blocking out, of deciding what to cover and what to uncover. The block-out process reveals specific words that express my story and demonstrate a will to survive my losses. It is part of the attempt to heal the emotional scars caused by trauma. Cobain’s own pain was made public through his music, writing, and art. My deeply repressed pain becomes uncoverable through his work, as I excavate his words to find my own.
My interference in the artist’s journal produces a secondary pattern that has a soothing aesthetic – yet closer inspection of the lines reveals the dirty words that are not blocked out. This partial obscuration brings attention to the hidden nature of psychological trauma. My interference with the ready-made evokes a sense of traumatic disturbance.
I consider my iconography while altering the book: the vertical line used to block out the text, for example, stands as a metaphor for life. Vertical lines also represent a way of counting the days since my father has passed and, as such, provide commentary on the ongoing daily struggle with the trauma of the event. Lines are known to attract attention to a subject – in this case, the pain embedded in the words not lined out.
The process of continuously searching for connections is integral to my art-making. I incorporated this practice into my body of work with a stop-frame animation, recording both my compulsion to find links and the sounds of my pen scratching at the surface of the paper.
My three-dimensional work aims to intervene. With a three-dimensional pen, I mimic the writing in Cobain’s journals and push it outside the confines of a flat surface. My intervention brings the words of pain into the public space, rebelling against the childhood moment in which the teacher silenced me. By writing with a flexible, glossy black plastic material, the words become resilient, challenging conventional ways of dealing with pain. Translating the private space of the diary into three-dimensional writing allows it to escape into the public sphere, where pain deliberately goes unexplored.
My body of work comprises integrated pieces that communicate my personal experiences and my ongoing efforts to find connections between the past and the present. The altered book, the stop-frame animation, and the artist’s catalogue are displayed on three individual plinths, creating a triptych. The number three is significant in my personal life, because my birthdate contains this number three times (03-03-1983).[i] The triptych not only acts as a particular symbol, but it also has various other deeper symbolic meanings.
Birth, life, and death | Beginning, middle, and end | Past, present, and future.
[i] In numerology, my life-path number (derived from adding up all the digits of my birthdate) is nine. Another connection I have with Kurt Cobain is that we share the same life-path number.
