As always, please take care of yourself when engaging with content that relates to trauma. Choose how much you would like to engage with and when.
You may find our self-care invitations and support links useful.
Artist: Laura E. Fischer
Title: Searching for the Horizon
Date: 2015
Medium: acrylic on canvas
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This piece is one of a series of over forty paintings I made while I was deep in the midst of trauma. I was continuously reliving the violence I had been subjected to, my body was a perpetual echo of horror with no ability to discern what belonged to the past or the present. I couldn't grasp reality long enough to know where I was and there was no horizon line to guide my step. I needed something to hold on to and I needed to draw colours back into my life. So I painted. Again, and again, and again. Through my paintings, I created the horizons I needed to craft myself a path forward - through and beyond trauma.
Welcome to the fourth piece of the Living Archive of Survivorhood of Trauma.
Below is a selection of works from our Arts Collective, created in response to this month's cover.
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Artist: Isaac Ouro-Gnao
Title: body incantations
Date: 2017
Artist: Julie-Yara Atz
Title: j'ai abandonné ma main
Date: 2024
Artist: Julian Triandafyllou
Title: Running Man
Date: 2006
Running Man was a piece made in 2006 whilst studying at Central Saint Martins. I was trying to explore cyclical narratives, whilst playing on familiar or uncanny elements. In retrospect, however, the piece recalls the feeling of hypervigilance, and fear that I have experienced whilst dealing with the effects of trauma - it acts as an archive piece to a part of me I no longer inhabit. Laura's painting brings me into a similar space, it takes me to prior experiences of dissociation, to feeling lost in a narrative of time, to being seperated from myself.
