Make It Make Sense

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

Make It Make Sense explores the strange relationship between self, disability and a body that can feel simultaneously familiar and foreign.

Figures accumulate across the sculpture, clinging to limbs, obscuring the head and adding their weight to an already burdened body. They developed intuitively through the moulds and forms available to me, but came to embody the way I imagine Multiple Sclerosis, grief and trauma: invisible forces that can feel as though they are attached to me, inside me and weighing me down.

At times, that weight feels almost physical. I imagine being encased in wax or mud, fighting through something dense in order to see, think, feel or move. With MS, this metaphor can become unexpectedly literal. Sight, sensation, cognition and emotion can all be altered by a disease occurring within the brain and nervous system.

A small, faceless figure sits above the larger body. It relates to my experience of dissociation, when I can feel separated from myself, almost watching from above and pulling the strings of my own body like a puppet master. The work deliberately complicates where the self resides: in the body beneath, the figure above, the things attached to it, or somewhere between them all.

The words “MAKE IT MAKE SENSE” appear across the cherub-like head. The phrase references Wheelchair Sports Camp, whose music and disability activism have been important to me, while also expressing something deeply personal. My life and body do not always make sense to me, however much I try to understand them.

Across the larger body, “DISABILITY IS PUNK AS FUCK” offers a defiant counterpoint. Punk, for me, is rebellion: existing outside systems and expectations, voicing the unpopular opinion, allowing anger to exist, and refusing the shame attached to bodies, emotions and experiences that are completely human.

MS occupies an uncomfortable position within my sense of self. I do not entirely experience it as me, yet it lives with me and participates in almost every decision I make. I cannot simply decide what I want to do without negotiating with this other presence. At the same time, because MS affects my brain, cognition, sensation and mood, it cannot be cleanly separated from who I am.

The sculpture does not attempt to resolve that contradiction. Instead, bodies and figures merge, obstruct, support and overwhelm one another beneath an exuberant surface of colour and dripping decoration. The work refuses the visual language of tragedy while allowing anger, confusion, grief and disability to occupy the same body.

It does not make sense. Perhaps it does not have to.