Content Warning: 
This project contains themes of sexual violence.

 

This series is about storytelling, specifically, human storytelling within institutional systems and frameworks. My work uses personal data to document an autobiographical narrative of my lived experience with sexual violence, positioning this experience as one story among the harrowingly high numbers of individuals who are subjected to sexualized violence during their university years. 

 

A systemic issue, sexual violence is largely built into and perpetuated by institutional and social power complexes. After many years behind closed doors, the advent of the #MeToo movement (beginning in 2006 and resurging in 2017) has gradually allowed the development of language and space for this issue to be confronted and discussed in the public realm. 

 

Because sexual violence is entwined with power complexes, the language that has been used to discuss these matters has historically been controlled and repressed by perpetrators. It is not surprising, then, to observe the existing lexicon of sexual violence as one designed to describe ambiguity and ultimately, erasure. 

 

This series challenges conclusions about sexual violence that are solely informed through quantitative reasoning and statistical analysis. In the Numbers offers a revisualized narrative of sexual violence through a lens which prioritizes human value over quantitative value. 

 

My drawings speak on behalf of the many individuals whose experiences never make it to “the numbers,” whose stories have never been told, founded or validated. My drawings are a requisition for the return of empathy and soul to data interpretation.

 

Beyond the data themselves, my work also considers the contexts in which information is interpreted. These drawings examine the blurred and grey lines that obscure understanding about complex boundaries between individual and institution, trauma and healing, and body and space.

 

Often a symbol of institutional structure, I employ gridwork as a means to understand calculated and codified space. In my drawings, the grid functions as a site of reasoning. Further, borrowing ideas from weaving methodology, I also employ the grid as a site of production, of connected creativity. It is this latter approach which allows my artistic practice to be a conduit for healing in and collective engagement with the systemic issue of sexual violence that pervades culture today.