This piece was made for my Chronic Pain Exhibition, to show what a brain injury could look like. Here is a blurb from the plaque I made:
After multiple childhood concussions, Riley describes his lingering pain and
cognitive symptoms as “gears grinding where thoughts used to be.” In this
portrait, soft lines of color and fragments of exposed machinery spill from
his mind, a surreal interpretation of how trauma reshapes memory and
perception. The machinery is delicate, almost beautiful, but always working
against him. You feel its presence, like catching a shimmer in your
periphery, real, but unreachable.
