When the Body Speaks

How do you translate suffering? What the body cannot say alone and words cannot make whole, art will fill the gaps and tell you of my pain and joy.

Erika Clugston’s latest series of oil paintings visualizes her struggle to communicate invisible pain, pleasure, and bodily experience. Created in response to hospitalizations for major surgeries, she painted over medical documents, journal entries, x-rays, drawings, and notes to piece together tangible fragments of her lived experience into an expressive testimony of an embodied life. Facts and feelings, scans and memories—the body holds these truths in its enigmatic landscape of color and light.

While Erika’s series stems from her specific experience, it speaks to the universal struggle of women to be believed by the medical establishment and get accurate diagnoses. Documents from over a decade of doctor visits are layered under the paintings, creating landscapes littered with test results, misdiagnoses, and false proclamations that “nothing’s wrong.” Doctors rely on data that reduces embodied experience to numbers and percentages to judge the meaning of "normality." But what happens when the numbers don’t add up? When language fails to express pain, it fuels the gender health gap and upholds a society in which women’s pain isn’t believed, and their lives are at risk. So, how do we express the truth of our inner experience to the outside world? Erika’s paintings forge a new path of communication to make the invisible visible.