Discomposure

Discomposure addresses the experience of living in a body with autoimmune disease.

The parts are legible; the whole is not. Torso, elbows, and hips hold their edges, but what they amount to is unclear.

The work explores an irony: in autoimmune disease, the very mechanism meant to protect the body mistakes its protectorate for the threat.

The photograph was made during the height of my illness, a period defined by confusion and by the sense of confinement. Stripped of scale and context, the flesh reads as landscape, as obstacle, as barrier. Composure comes undone; what remains is the tangle.