Artist Statement
Solve et PraeservÄ
This illustrated series explores the embodied experience of chronic illness in the context of the pursuit of creative work. Limited access to medical care and an inability to address underlying socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes lead the artist to feel dissected and reduced to a collection of disconnected parts.
The absence of holistic solutions necessitates the separate preservation of individual components. Chronic ailments of the respiratory system, the cognitive-neurological system, and the fascia of the non-dominant hand are treated on a symptomatic basis. Facing existential dread and growing debt, the artist’s drawing hand, while functional, must also be preserved and protected as health and living conditions deteriorate. It is the only thing that stands between the artist and ruin.
This demand to separate and preserve, with stakes that threaten life and livelihood, presses the artist to consider methods that span the rational and non-rational to assert agency in increasingly desperate circumstances. Drawing upon his affection for speculative fiction, horror, and the study of religion, the artist references preservation in diverse contexts: from the saintly relic and the occult hand of glory to the ostensibly scientific practices of taxidermy, lepidoptery, and cryogenics.
Digital media and public domain medical illustration.