Absence, Vacancy reflects on emptiness, a personal history of anorexia and the lack I felt during a particularly troublesome period of my life. The work calls into question whether this physical and psychological inanition (exhaustion caused by feelings of malnourishment) existed in the realm of an absence or vacancy – was something merely removed here or does it exist as unoccupied space, longing to be whole with its surroundings?
The artwork consists of three conceptually interconnected works: a painting, a book, and drawings, carefully excised from the book’s pages. The painting is intentionally ambiguous, stylized to represent anyone with four limbs, including the viewer. I chose to split the body into sections as a manifestation of viewing my own body as pieces to reshape as well as to express the disconnectedness I often feel between mind and body. The book speaks to the title of the work, consisting of pages with voids, of interconnected spaces marked only by drawn shadows of something that is no longer there. The drawings of food were created daily for one month, by closely observing one thing that I ate during each of those days. The intense level of concentration, and mindfulness necessary to make these observational drawings was difficult to sustain, as, although food had been a hyper fixation in my past, I hadn’t before attempted to look at food so objectively.
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