Transforming a chronic disease into a durational performance: 114 Hemiplegic Migraines documents each attack in 2024 with a photo illustration.
114 Hemiplegic Migraines
Augmented Ink
Augmented Ink is series of hybrid drawings: part ink on paper, part photograph, part digital color finger painted on a phone. The project started as a way to further explore drawing while chronically ill, with the images and techniques developed at home, in bed or on the couch, using tools that fit easily into that environment. Using A5 paper, ball point pens, books as drawing surfaces, and phone for photographs and coloring all combined to create ease of access. This expanded to include cutting out the inks on paper and staging them around the house.
But what happens when an established process meets new place?
25 images into the series M took the process on a visit to their Mothers home: an RV summering in Wyoming. M’s Mother is also disabled and has crafted her own living space to meet those limitations. In this new space M experimented with how a process designed for one kind of disabled life might need to shift and change when exposed to a very different disabled lived experience.
The inks shifted from fine liners to thicker markers to enabled the quick hand needed in a space that was constantly moving. Singular drawings creating singular photographs was replaced with a collage of smaller drawing pieces not simply held up to photograph but instead installed mixed into the complex indoor and outdoor spaces. And with limited access to electricity to recharge their phone the artist stopped making each image beginning to end before starting a new one and instead focused their limited battery on photographing, leaving the final color stage for when they returned home.
This Will Take Time Artist Residency
During their time at This Will Take Time they focused on drawing with an augmented reality headset. AR is an extremely ephemeral material as the drawings themselves could not be saved so only image and video documentation of the drawings survive.
The drawings include room scale abstractions, 3d figure drawings in situ within the furniture of the residency house, and performances in which the artist interacts with the finished pieces. They explore not only the drawings relationships with their surrounding but also how the artist’s body shares that space with them.
In Climb into Bed a gender ambiguous figure is arranged in a pose reminiscent from 19th century female nude paintings, but they aren't the only nude in the video. The artist climbs into bed with the figure drawing, attempting to touch their immaterial form, conjuring up ideas about consent, avatars, and touch across the digital divide.
Due to the limitations of the AR headset the artist also created a set of 5 speculative drawing performances for video to explore what could be possible with better hardware and software.
Speculative AR Drawings in 5 figures
Bodies of Meat and Light
“I’ve not seen a piece like this before. Mesmerising.” -Viewer
Room Scale Abstraction
Pain Time
Pain Time is a series of drawings/diagrams of pain over time created by stacking the frames from animations created to simulate physical pain. Each piece was an attempt to map pain time and communicate the way pain smears and stacks standard time.
Other etc.
As both a transgender and Autistic person M Eifler frequently experiences being “clocked” in social situations. These drawing explore and represent that ongoing othering.
Anatomy Drawings
This series of drawings and collages explore diagrammatic depictions of the body, prosthetics, and tumors/physical abnormalities.
Self Portrait in a Chair
Self Portrait in a Chair is a gif animation of a diffuse rotating cloud hovering above a line drawing of a chair. It was the culmination of a series of drawings featuring abstractions of bodies among various furniture.