I used the character of Ophelia here as a metaphor of what it can feel like living as an “outsider”. Coming at it as a person on the Spectrum, at times life can feel like I am some droid amalgamation, half human half alien, floating through life. Not fully here, not fully comprehending, just masking long enough to get through the day. Having to feel the constant pang of loneliness and abandonment because you can never quite find a place you belong or a person you can truly trust because you essentially view the world completely differently. After awhile, you must fight that urge to just give up and drown, incapable of your own distress.
As One Incapable of Her Own Distress
2025
74” x 25”
Acrylic ink on wood assemblage
Available through the ZACC - Purchase HERE
Gertrude - “There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
There, with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
(That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them)
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued unto
that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”
Laertes - “Alas, then, she is drowned?”
Gertrude - “Drowned, drowned.”