Slow Release, 2024

Embroidery on paper, blister pack, pill capsules, scrap embroidery floss

12.5 x 8.75 in.

While some chronic illness rituals and their outcomes are concrete—like taking medication each day—others are more abstract: How do we distract ourselves from the pain that remains and the worry it creates? For many people living with chronic pain, we turn to art. For me, I embraced embroidery and its slow, meditative process that enables me to move through my pain each day, one small stitch at a time. By encapsulating the end-threads leftover from years of this embroidery routine in pill form, “Slow Release” conceptualizes art practice as medicine, a treatment regimen with the same import and value as pharmaceuticals. Inversely, presenting medication as an art object in its own right subverts the sterile and medicalized connotations of illness and disability as a means of challenging its associated stigma and shame. Here, art and medicine are intertwined—equal partners in the slow, sustained, and methodical rituals of treating  and coping with chronic pain.

Art is process is medicine is ritual.