Touch: Pain

"Pain has plagued us throughout the history of our species. We spend our lives trying to avoid it, and, from one point of view, what we call "happiness" may be just the absence of pain... And we also talk about emotional distress as pain. Pains are often combined, the emotional with the physical, and the physical with the physical..." - Diane Ackerman ... I decided to simulate the layers of skin through the use of layers of tracing paper. I wanted to focus on the inevitable feelings of pain over time, focusing on both physical rehabilitation of the skin and emotional pain stemming from the deepest layer. I started on the deepest layer of skin, drawing a beautiful flower filled with life and strength in order to represent our bodies/skin in an ideal, pain-free world. As we live in the world and experience different forms of pain, the flower on each layer slowly begins to wither away and die. We try to heal ourselves from the physical pain by developing new layers, but the emotional pain may never fully recover. We still have a living flower, but as the years go on our flower gets tired, weary, and droopy. It is up to us to find strength and perseverance in order to keep our emotional flowers alive and well.