Art looks beneath the surface of life, and for me the place to look has always been the body.
When disability made it hard for me to be out moving through the world, I made my own body the focus of my work, exploring the connections between pain, consciousness, and creativity. I draw myself from the inside out, tuning in to sensory and kinesthetic perceptions and finding beauty in a curving spine.
I anchor my work in anatomical reality, drawing from my own medical images and from skeletons and cadaver dissections in the Anatomy Lab at NYU’s School of Medicine. But anatomy is not inherently medical, and my goal is to reclaim the inner landscape: to use the textures of real flesh and bone to tell the story of one body’s life.
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An artist in the world of medicine
As an artist, I saw my spine as a graceful curve with a beauty of its own, suggesting flow and movement and a subtle balance arising out of asymmetry. But the
[When I looked for images of a spine like mine, I found only pathology: figures at their most unattractive, awkwardly bending forward and appearing exaggeratedly hunchbacked. ]
This was the perspective I brought to my role as Artist in Residence at NYU’s School of Medicine. In my Art & Anatomy drawing class, in the Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine, med students, doctors, and other health professionals could look at anatomy with the eyes of an artist, and appreciate the unique beauty of each body, however different.