I Always Look OK

I ALWAYS LOOK OK

The work considers the selective visibility of chronic illness and the strange control involved in deciding when other people are allowed to see you. “I always look OK because I control when you see me.” When so much of life and the body can feel uncontrollable, withdrawing becomes one thing I can control. Dissociation complicates this further, allowing me to hide not only from other people, but sometimes from the truth of how I am feeling.

Chronic illness does not always produce memorable episodes with clear beginnings and endings. There are recurring lulls, periods of retreat and recovery that become ordinary through repetition. I rarely want to recount every bad day or symptom, and I am conscious that care and sympathy can feel finite. There is an uncomfortable negotiation between wanting to be understood and not wanting illness to consume the way I am seen.

The face was deliberately constructed as a vessel, its handles becoming oversized ears and its interior remaining hollow and inaccessible. The small face was my first casting from this mould; its neck was lost in the process and the incomplete form was incorporated rather than corrected. Looking back at the finished work, it feels less like a portrait than a relic: an object left behind by something that cannot be fully seen.

I look OK because that is often the version of me I have chosen to make visible.