Patho/logic

2022 (plaster, wood lath, house paint, journal pages)

Patho/logic is my senior thesis work exploring themes of disability, connection, and personal narrative, comprising of a gallery piece and a series of short memoir-style essays.

The sculpture won 2nd place for the sculpture category in Pennsylvania Museum’s Art of the State exhibition in 2022. My proposal for the project and its accompanying essay series won my university honors department’s Friends of Murray Library student research grant in 2021.

Statement

I spent much of my childhood in psychologists’ offices, surrounded by the diagnostic criteria and measurements doctors used to analyze my personality. Since then, I’ve been intrigued by the structures people use to make sense of human experience. As an artist, I process my experiences through my work, by organizing physical objects according to numerical patterns—a habit that was considered “maladaptive” by my childhood doctors. 

Patho/logic returns to the medical models of my childhood and explores how they relate to my own structures for understanding the world. The individual walls are hand-constructed based on my body’s scale (arm span, height, and finger width), while the windows cut out of them are gridded according to my clinical cognitive measurements. The journal pages inside chronicle how I have narratively made sense of my life over several years. By bringing these different ways of interpreting my experience together, I hope to both question and reconcile with the systems that pathologized me.