Title of project: Scars

Artists:
Lee Fearnside, M.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design
Institutional Affiliation: Tiffin University
leefearnside@yahoo.com

James Rovira, Ph.D. Drew University
Institutional Affiliation: Tiffin University
jamesrovira@gmail.com

Scars transforms the persistent memories of severe trauma embodied in physical scars
into mixed media works that combine poetry and black and white photography with one-
minute sound clips. The three works completed so far, Deer, Exodus, and Breathe,
record how individuals bearing scars view them as sites of personal reflection, hinge
points upon which their past transforms into their present, and how a scars
transformative potential can be more fully realized through a further metamorphosis into
an artistic product. Because severe physical scars are the enduring memory of traumatic
events that once shaped our lives, they have the potential to persistently force disturbing
memories upon us. How we remember in the case of our scars is no longer a question
of the availability of prompts for memory, which are ever-present, being inscribed upon
our very bodies, but of the ways we can continue to actively shape and define memory
through art and narrative as our memories of severe trauma have actively shaped and
defined us.

The two artists collaborating to create Scars work in film, photography, and poetry; the
poet has recently published a monograph on William Blake, while the photographer has
had her artwork shown in galleries across the country and her documentary film on PBS.
For this project, the visual artist brought together her work in film with her work in
photography to produce images that are at once art and archive, while the poet combined
his poetry with his scholarship on William Blake to contribute both the epigrams and
concepts about the integration of text and image. Together, they interviewed the subjects
of these photographs and distilled these interviews into one-minute sound clips that
capture the essence of the traumatic events first memorialized in living tissue and now in
photography and poetry combined.

Deer combines black and white images of a right forearm scar with a section of
pavement to recreate both scene and aftereffect of a deers head crashing through the
windshield of a car during an accident. The lines I CAST MYSELF INTO THINE
ARMS / AND SHINING RAGE frame the photo top and bottom, while the line INTO
THINE STEEL ANGER crosses the image itself in large, semitransparent text. The text
suggests the deers point of view as it was chased across the road by hunters only to be
hit by an oncoming car. Since the deers antlers came within inches of killing the driver,
scarring the drivers arm and just stopping short of his chest, the text dramatizes the
deers death as its last, desperate attempt at justice.

A large, vertical abdominal scar juxtaposed against a hospital entrance combine to form
Exodus. The words Desire crept in / parting her womb / like Moses parting the deep
red sea fill a translucent, inverted, two-pronged white cross. The words both part and
connect the two images the same way that this scar is a physical memory of the parting
and rejoining of the sufferers abdomen. Title, image, and text pun on the Exodus story,
associating the parting of the Red Sea with freedom and desire. This scar was formed by
an emergency surgery that removed a sixteen-pound tumor from a teenage girls
abdominal cavity. During this surgery she lost an ovary.

Breathe aestheticizes and eroticizes the physical memory of thoracic surgery in which
the subjects ribs were parted and a portion of her lung removed to evacuate a cancerous
tumor. The scar image overlaps, blends, and intersects with an image of a hospital
parking lot. The words When you are inside of me / I can breathe evoke a sense of the
intimacy, interiority, and penetration associated with surgery, and seem to float above
and across the image as if her wound exhaled a feeling of freedom before being stitched
shut.

This wall-mounted exhibit requires approximately five feet of horizontal wall space and
twelve inches of vertical wall space if the images are arranged horizontally, or
approximately three feet of horizontal wall space and three feet of vertical wall space if
arranged vertically. Sounds clips are optional; if used, the artists can provide either .mp3
clips for sound equipment provided by the gallery, or they can provide simple,
unobtrusive wall-mounted .mp3 players with headphones.

Image Inventory List

1. Deer (2011): 8 x 21, framed digital inkjet print.

2. Exodus (2011): 7 x 15, framed digital inkjet print.

3. Breathe (2011): 7 x 16, framed digital inkjet print.