Threading Pain was born from the idea of how pain grows inside us. As someone who lives with endometriosis, a chronic illness, my life is marked by a constant pain that is hard to explain, invisible from the outside and therefore difficult for others to grasp.
But pain is not tied to a single disease. I believe each of us carries a pain that is hard to explain, one that belongs only to us. Visible pain, or defined pain, is easily understood. Most pain, however, has no name and for this reason it is harder to overcome or heal.
Even unseen, internal pain keeps growing, touching every part of our lives; Infinite threads forming like a spider's web with no beginning and no end. For this reason, the threads of the installation continued to grow and change shape throughout the exhibition.
Within those black threads, though, there is hope. Suspended among them are pearl-like spheres of varying sizes, a direct reference to how oysters create pearls. When an irritant, like sand or debris, enters the oyster's shell, the oyster doesn't expel it; it wraps it, layer by layer, until the irritation becomes a pearl. Threading Pain draws on this same transformation: pain that cannot be removed can still be held, layered, and slowly turned into something else.