STATEMENT OF WORK

Have you ever changed your parents’ diaper, experienced age-related hallucinations, cared for someone who has, or administered the Heimlich? Is it a biological unwillingness of good health, of youth, or is it simply privilege that obstructs our ability to meaningfully imagine ourselves so wholly unguarded? Among the able-bodied and able-minded general population is an instinctual unknowing that we too should be so vulnerable or even die one day. With my paintings, prints and installations I am examining thanatophobia, the anxiety elicited when one contemplates aging or death.

An artist with a history notable for several adverse childhood events and later the opportunity to serve under-resourced populations, I attribute much of the inspiration for my current body of work to the privilege of my experiences in fast paced critical care settings. As the Postgraduate Social Work Fellow in Yale’s Department of Psychiatry, for two years I trained as a member of an ambulatory treatment team in a community-based acute services unit.  I conducted several hundred mobile crisis psychiatric evaluations, coordinated provision of care with law enforcement and ER physicians ensuring the delivery of trauma-informed services, and treated the bereaved and convalescing, and individuals with age-related dementias and trauma-based psychosis.

In these roles I could not avoid the compelled observance and quiet reverence that consumed me when I was witness to the moment of death.  Nor could I unknow the immediacy of exposure or the intimacy of communing with the aging, insane, and infirmed.  The haunting images of disoriented survivors remain.