Synesthesia Sequencing
syn·es·the·sia /ˌsinəsˈTHēZHə/ — the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
I’ve had synesthesia since I was a small child, which, for me, means I see small, colorful shapes dancing around each other in tightly woven, undulating patterns in the air before me. They change in color, shape, size, and vibrancy in response to music, scents, atmospheres, and physical and emotional feelings. I started to see these patterns more vividly when I developed vertigo for a few years, noticing the details of each shape more clearly. I no longer have vertigo, but since then, I’ve delved into illustrating the patterns on paper for others to experience. Most of my pieces represent songs, as they are the easiest to accurately document since I can play songs on repeat. Here are some of those pieces:
In the spring of 2018 I made a collection called “What I See” that pertained specifically to my disabilities — my goal was to visualize the invisible, that is, the invisible illnesses such as Fibromyalgia and Meniere’s Disease that I was dealing with at the time.
The first piece, “Coils and Daggers,” is a diptych of black and white images of my body parts where I experienced the most chronic pain, with the patterns drawn on transparent paper mirrored with the images.
The second piece, “The Crunch,” is an animated GIF of the patterns evolving into more patterns—a first attempt at animating my drawings to more accurately portray my synesthesia.
The third piece, “Seven Days a Week,” is a long strip of grid paper with seven sections mimicking a weekly pill sorter—each section has a large letter and circles where the braille letters would be. This piece is a representation of the one thing that is the most consistent thing in my life and the most persistent reminder of my chronic illnesses, because this shape is often the first thing I see in the morning, every morning.
The Space She Left
On November 8th, 2016, as current President Trump secured the nomination, my paternal grandmother passed away from a treatable infection in a low-income nursing home. It was a devastating loss. My grandmother was an incredible watercolor painter who successfully sold her works as paintings as well as postcards and gift cards in the gift shops of the Oregon parks she painted, but she also had just as many stacks of unfinished paintings. It was a running joke how many unfinished pieces she had, but her passing made those empty spaces harder to bare, as she’d never be able to finish them. My parents asked me to finish some of her paintings as a sort of healing through generational transference, but I didn’t want to ruin her paintings, so I made separate ones that just filled in the spaces she’d left behind in those pieces. I chose a painting of my dad and his sister, a dress design set for her beloved porcelain doll who she sewed outfits for, and a landscape piece, as landscapes were her most frequent subject.
