using my ceramics practice to process and document my personal experiences in the healthcare system.
The project:
In 2018, I found out that I was pregnant in an emergency room 3,000 miles from home. My pregnancy had started – and ended – in the wrong place, rupturing my fallopian tube, prompting a tidal wave of internal bleeding and sending me immediately into surgery. This series in porcelain explores the aftermath of those events, and is a journal of my healing process. These wheel-thrown forms, some with ‘bruised’ glazes, represent injuries both visible and invisible – for instance, a few of the pieces in the series cannot perform their function because of something not immediately visible to the viewer.
What happened next:
Pieces from this series have been exhibited at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (Mineral Grit, juried exhibition, 2019), the Lincoln Square Pottery Studio in Chicago (Pottery of Protest, community show, 2019), and the Kaldas Center for Fertility, Surgery, and Pregnancy (The ART of Infertility, permanent collection, 2019).
Why it matters:
Ceramics offered me an unconventional outlet for engaging in patient advocacy, time and space to navigate my postoperative anxiety and depression, and an opportunity to ask tough questions about my design practice. While at the wheel, I reflected on my time managing a grant portfolio around emergency surgery (having never felt the terror of having one), designing curricula about contraceptives (having never had an unplanned pregnancy), and building features for a medication adherence app (having never undertaken such a rigorous pill regimen). Facing well-intentioned, but harmful, questions and assumptions about what happened and what I wanted crystallized my resolve to ensure that people with lived experience are in positions with real decision-making power on every design team I’m part of.
Year: 2018-2019
Location: Baltimore, Chicago, and Wisconsin