LOVE LETTERS TO TURBULENCE
ARTIST STATEMENT
Love Letters to Turbulence (LLtT) is an interdisciplinary project combining visual, digital, and participatory elements exploring healing after trauma; offering creative opportunities to re/imagine ideas of identity through re/considering autobiographical narratives.
Viewers/participants are invited to reflect on, and/or share, about the lasting e/affects of trauma, at their own comfort level, through multiple entry points. Comprising a main installation, contributor ‘zines, community workshops, a digital platform, and evolving collaborative archive, LLtT is site-responsive and durational. The exhibition is designed to travel across Canada - changing in the process - to institutional and community spaces, with accessibility and consent-centered participation built into its framework.
Individually and communally, LLtT is a tool for co-communicating trauma related experiences with self, survivors, and/or supporters. Through this, LLtT will help normalize trauma-related communication, removing some of the often-associated shame, silencing, and ignorance, thus co-creating more comfortable and trauma-informed habitual ways of relating.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
To be considered as a whole (or in parts, site-specific):
INTRODUCTORY SPACE
Initial greeting upon entrance to help guide viewers/participants into the work is a Welcome Care Station, offering choice and agency, informing of the project’s subject matter and providing supportive take-away resources. Placed nearby is a large wall-mounted lightbox illuminating a photograph of closed, stacked journals. Suspended from centre ceiling and facing the door (where applicable), is Safety Blanket; a quilt created as a survivor’s tool to signify nervous-system overload during intimacy. Referencing “work that is never done,” the quilt is ‘unfinished’; made from repurposed bedsheets and raw canvas with a safe-word signifying different levels of overload clearly and largely embroidered across the centre of each side. To the quilt edges, left and right, is space for further gallery entry.
’MANUSCRIPT’
Multiple, parallel-stacked clotheslines thread across, flush-to-the-walls, holding selections from the 300-page 8.5” X 8.5” loose-leaf ‘manuscript’ (ink, graphite, photo-retouching fluid, watercolour, vintage typewriters, and cotton paper). Autobiographical narratives relating to my lived experiences weave throughout, resourcing journal entries (1991-present) specifically relating to systemic class and gender-based violence (including child, teen, and adult sexual assault), self-awareness (20+ years of trauma recovery), and healing. These works describe a nonlinear state, less about the exact who-what-where-when-why’s of particular traumas and more about the after e/affects of trauma in, on, and through a being.
‘ZINES
Seven artists – Leah Abramson, Sonja Ahlers, Joy Gyamfi, Marieke Helmke, Lichen, M-A Murphy and Kira Pratt – have each contributed a ‘zine to be displayed in a separate area to the ‘manuscript’, on walls otherwise left empty at exhibition openings for collaborative durational purposes. These ‘zines were initiated by an artist-led invitation to view the ‘manuscript’ and respond, working with similar materials and reprinted ‘manuscript’ pages individually selected by each artist. Each ‘zine exemplifies an alternate, trauma-informed, and related autobiographical narrative.
WORKSHOPS
Artist-led consent-informed workshops with similar mediums to those used in the ‘manuscript’ and ‘zines will be offered (including vintage typewriters and reprinted ‘manuscript’ and ‘zine pages). With intended usage openly shared, viewers/participants will be invited to create 8.5” X 8.5” individual pages and/or ‘zines, and, upon completion, to keep and/or anonymously donate their work to LLtT. If part of an exhibition, the donated works will be scanned and displayed alongside the original ‘zines, revealing a changed, transient, and co-created (by/with viewers/participants) project by the exhibition’s closing.
DIGITAL CONTAINER
Expanding beyond gallery walls is LLtT’s Digital Container, co-created with designer Randy Walton, to gather anonymously contributed autobiographical narratives relating to trauma, healing and support. The Digital Container will launch publicly and universally alongside LLtT’s launch at THIS ___ Gallery, Aug 21 2026, continuing to collect narratives throughout the travelling exhibition (three years). After which, with respect to impermanence, the contributed digital narratives will be removed, effectively disappearing, and, with respect to legacy and rebirth, a hard-copy and digital artist book will be created, combining the ‘manuscript’, contributed ‘zines, and donated workshop works collected across Canada.
