ANN HALEY
THE FRONT / NEW ORLEANS
JAN 9 - FEB 7, 2021
pain is important
how we evade it
how we succumb to it
how we deal with it
how we transcend it.
-Audre Lorde
GOOD BAD POSTURE is a map of my healing process through chronic pain and trauma from an accident with a semi-truck in 2015. Distilling the human form down to the ligaments and bones, while going through the repetitive motions of physical therapy, I am building layers of paint to write my body’s topography, working each painting as I work my body through a different stage of healing.
The marks I make delineate a space for the collision itself and the PTSD that came with it, the time spent in bed, listening to doctors, in surgery, in bandages and braces, doing exercises and stretches, the metal that is now fused to my cervical spine, and the pain that never really went away. But also a space for the body’s remarkable ability to strengthen, to grow and to heal.
I began this process believing that healing means to be fixed; to be like before; a linear journey from broken to whole. Through my own cyclical process of growth and strain, I know that healing is not an erasure or extraction of what is hurting you, but the creation of spaces for holding that hurt, confronting it, wrestling it, and loving yourself through it. These works investigate the liminal space that exists between one’s ability to cope and heal from trauma and one’s ability to accept and transcend pain.
The marks I make delineate a space for the collision itself and the PTSD that came with it, the time spent in bed, listening to doctors, in surgery, in bandages and braces, doing exercises and stretches, the metal that is now fused to my cervical spine, and the pain that never really went away. But also a space for the body’s remarkable ability to strengthen, to grow and to heal.
I began this process believing that healing means to be fixed; to be like before; a linear journey from broken to whole. Through my own cyclical process of growth and strain, I know that healing is not an erasure or extraction of what is hurting you, but the creation of spaces for holding that hurt, confronting it, wrestling it, and loving yourself through it. These works investigate the liminal space that exists between one’s ability to cope and heal from trauma and one’s ability to accept and transcend pain.
support, GOOD BAD POSTURE, 2020