Camilla Jerome

Lives and works in Nahant, MA, USA

Artist statement

'Wounds Need Air' is my testimony of being silenced and disregarded as a woman in pain. Today, a doctor’s bedside rhetoric uses modern terms for hysteria to gaslight and inflict gendered medical abuse. The Western ideals of whiteness, beauty, femininity, and health drown out the belief in our suffering. After a lifetime of chronic pain and multi-system dysfunction, I was diagnosed with a genetic condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome at age thirty. Anne Boyer writes in her book "The Undying," “Radiology turns a person made of feelings and flesh into a patient made of light and shadows.” X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans couldn’t show my suffering, and I began to believe that photography had failed me. My chronically ill and disabled body is not in a fixed state but a fluid being. A performance of pain and images crafted on bedsheets, canvases, reflections, and seashells is a gesture of reclamation of my voice and lost time. This method of making with different tools creates multiple access points of deciphering and discernment, similar to the day-to-day endurance and management of chronic illness.

Artwork

• I Tried So Hard to Keep it All Together, 2021. cyanotype and bathwater on canvas, mirror, wood, and monofilament
• Show Me Where it Hurts, 2021. Single-channel HD video performance (projected)
• Someone Once Told Me, You Can See Yourself Clearest in the Dark, 2022. Cyanotype on cotton bedsheets and wood
• You Are Worthy of Rest, 2023. cyanotype and bathwater on canvas, thread, and recycled polyfil
• Patient, Patient, 2022. Cyanotype on Arches watercolor paper
• Sometimes I'm Above Water, but Mostly I'm at Sea, 2023. Cyanotype on found oyster shells