The art work

The video piece, leave me alone from the series Bad Hand is in homage to Emma Hauck. I sat in a small soundproof room and wrote the first phrase that came to me, repeatedly, until the physical pain in my hand from writing made me stop. I used a Livescribe pen, with audio which enabled me to playback, in real-time, the act of writing (and the sound of my hand and pen as I wrote) and make this into a video.

While the well-known Hauck letters comprise of only one phrase, repeated, the letters that I received were sometimes lengthy and contained rich descriptive passages about objects, people and places. Reading these letters brought images to mind and that prompted an associated set of art pieces. The photographic series, Manifestations, are a product of a particular making process. Five years after the court case that temporarily imprisoned the man stalking me, I decided to re-read the transcripts of a batch of the letters he sent to me. I read one or two each day when I arrived at my studio. Sometimes I was literally sick with fear and revulsion. Other times I wept. My ‹situated cognition› was such that I could not easily separate the object (letter) from my embodied experience of it (nausea, adrenalin, stress) and its distributed environment (fear of death; the bureaucracy of crime). For weeks I gradually accustomed myself to reading the typed-up versions.