The Past Seven Days

Chronic illness often feels as if a cage is built to hold you apart from the abled world. At times, the cage is sharp; at other times, it screams of sirens and drills for undercover. Still more times, the cage is underneath your flesh, barbed wire twisting around your mind and leeching the energy from your limbs. You never necessarily craft that cage, but the key to unlock yourself from it is always held by abled hands.

The Past Seven Days is a metaphor for a common thing for me: being bedridden. As of 2016, when this work was exhibited, that bedridden nature was from a seven-day anxiety attack; upon the writing of this work in 2021, it is from the vague yet chronic exhaustion linked to the anecdotally-called "Long COVID." And yet, either disability lands me in the same spot: bed as island with the sharp promise of injury around it as moat, that very bed lifting from the great screaming of sirens within, a constant terror of some unsaid promise always on the horizon. Within its exhibition space at The Soap Factory, the wailing against its sister work is inadvertent metaphor: the great anxiety of disabled bodies and their needs often disappears into the chorus of the general anxiety of an Anthropocene existence, even as more disabled bodies begin to cry out for the tools to forge the moat.