Louise Samuelsson
We have lived through the same events. Met, loved and felt the same loss. But unlike me, you remember everything. You hold it all inside you. My body remembers. Let go through a collection of repetitive acts – of gestures and movements. What materials and processes let you speak with other bodies? Communicate love, longing, trauma and healing.
Poetics, the visceral and the corporeal are at the forefront of my written and practical work. Through my work, I interweave the complexities of emotions where the dichotomies of trauma and healing are translated into practice. I’m interested in binaries that coexist during trauma recovery: healing and hurting; connection and disconnection; strength and fragility. I aim to build a body of work that further evokes relationships between the particular and the universal. The collective trauma of COVID-19 on the world's population has brought acts of care to the forefront of people's minds and I continue to work through these new influences.
Overthinking is an activity we have all found ourselves indulging in this past year. Throwing ourselves into negative spirals and chaotic disaster narratives. What if we returned to our body after mentally being tossed miles away? Returned to our breathing. Acknowledging how our mind, heart and gut react and think. Acknowledging the journey, the vulnerability and the kindness that it takes to not fall apart. In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart writes that “... writing by hand assumes the speed of the body, it is linked to the personal … handwriting is to space what the voice is to time”. Embroidery being much slower than writing, mirror mantras in meditation. This year has taken me out of my own body and forced me to find new and old ways to connect and heal in a world with new barriers.
Stewart, S 1992, On Longing: Narratives of the Minature, the Giangantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham NC, USA
Sewing into Life, 2020
Linen fabric, cotton embroidery thread, acrylic paint
1500mm x 1000mm
Sewing into Life, 2020
Video work
02:09
