The Body Betrays:

Artist’s Statement

Explores the invisible realities of living with chronic illness — the pain that hides beneath the surface, the resilience required to endure it, and the quiet beauty that persists alongside it. Through self-portraiture and images of my daughter, this project investigates the intersection of visibility and invisibility, the duality of strength and fragility, and the deep emotional layers that illness imprints on identity and connection.

This body of work, photographed digitally and edited to black and white, draws on both natural and facilitated light, and the use of elements such as text, smeared paint and projected visuals. This is meant to serve as both documentation and as metaphor - a language of a body made invisible while a self works to regain visibility.

Chronic illness often exists quietly: within families, within lineages, within moments of grace and grief that the world overlooks. The duality of being seen and unseen all at once.

By translating these experiences into visual form, my hope is to create images that are layered, emotional, and intimate, and that invite viewers to witness, feel, and perhaps recognize parts of their own unseen struggles.

This work is deeply personal yet universal. It is created to honor both suffering and survival, loss and creation. It is a meditation on the body as an archive, a place of both pain and resilience, and a reminder that invisibility does not mean absence. My hope is that those who live with invisible pain feel seen and that those who do not might pause, soften, and look again.