What the Body Knows:
In Between the Lines, Stories from the Unspoken
In Between the Lines: Stories from the Unspoken is a visual memoir, conceived as an exhibition, capturing a chapter of uncertain health — the relentless, overwhelming unfolding of a body in search of answers.
Across three acts, it moves the viewer through an arc — from the circuitous path to diagnosis, to surgical interventions, to the meditative, narrative work of re-emerging, of looking back in order to look forward. Throughout, it poses questions to the viewer: How does communication help or hinder the body’s struggle to be discovered? Between what is heard and what is recorded, what is lost? How do we look forward when the past has weighed us down?
The Anatomy of a Medical Narrative, in Three Acts
Act I: The Weight in Waiting
This opening movement dwells in the liminal, often anxious spaces of waiting. Through spare, expressive pen and ink, these pieces hold the tension, the vulnerability, and the quiet dissonance of years-long search for answers — where language did not always fit what the body knew. Many of the drawings were made in waiting rooms.
Act II: Reflections of the Body Interior
Here the work turns inward, into an intimate, meditative space. Painted on rich, tactile handmade paper, these gouache works imagine what a surgeon sees — the body’s interior, rendered abstractly through an artist’s eyes. In the complete surrender of being under another’s care, imagining that other’s viewpoint becomes a way to widen one’s own. Something opens — and the act of visualizing can offer its own kind of healing.
Act III: Toward the Majestic
The last act is one of freedom. How do we free ourselves from experiences that weigh heavily? From those that cannot be changed? This is exactly where painting allows for new interior spaciousness. These abstracted landscapes offer glimpses into this artist’s attempt to introduce and infuse joy — to re-direct focus to a deeply human capacity: to live with duality, and to integrate what we carry.
There are many stories within this one,
waiting for another time and place.
