The full MFA Thesis Defence document can be found on the University of Waterloo’s database which includes acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures, image descriptions, etc.
Abstract
Surveying my work through a feminist approach to autotheory, Pacing the House is an exhibition that uses material inquiry to reframe personal trauma into a site of investigation. By creating systems of organization—categorizing, formatting, grouping—I work against dissociation to create meaningful connections in the physical world and use this process-based method as a form of knowledge gathering. By temporarily suspending external and dominant narratives that have upheld the stories I have repeatedly told myself, I recover and articulate my personal experiences through the creation of objects, installations and drawings that reflect these conceptual intensions. In my research, I seek ways to dismantle gendered and psychological abuse and to formulate those results in an experiential language while referencing residential architecture and childhood memories.
grief, letting go, violence, trauma, neglect abandonment, illness, shame, domestic abuse death, forgiveness, feminism, sick parents emotional, distress, tolerance, loss of relationships, intergenerational, house systems, control, interconnected, process behaviour, family, labour, poetics, resistance protection, function, psychology, hospital stays, fights, unsettled, scared, making sense histories, activism, inheritance, struggle memory, feelings, apology, forgotten remembering, topoanalysis, experiences account, reproduce, materials, killjoy, being wrong, anger, silence, refusing, we did not realize, risky, beating, disobedience persistence, politics, resilience, resistant, every day, organize, unknowable, self-censorship dignity, safety, empathy, responsibility, courage, you could taste the dust.
"For those of you who wish to leave politics out of dealing with trauma, I wish to remind you that trauma is all about living under social conditions where terrible things are allowed to happen and the truth cannot be told." —Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk
Chapter One
“There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever”[1]
I remember the accordion closet door, the pink insulation in the attic, the kitchen stool with the vinyl seat and fold-down steps. I remember cardboard boxes left on the front porch with childhood keepsakes. I remember that something was always wrong, and as would be expected, it has only compounded in its continuation. It does now, as it did then, leave me to carry an unpronounced fear of the admitted and the unknown.
Growing up, we lived in a black and white house on Meredith Drive— #103, to be exact. I have very few memories, and the ones I do have are fragmented. They don't show the full picture, but there are objects, textures, sounds, feelings, and specific moments that stand alone. When those memories come through, they are almost too much. And by almost, I mean that they are. I can see my 6-year-old self sitting in my room with my back against the door. I am terrified by my parents' shouting. My mom did something wrong, and she is being scolded. My dad is upset by whatever has been said or done that he announces to me, my sister, and my mom that he's leaving to kill himself and then drives off. He makes it clear that this is our fault. Sometime between the beginning of the attack and my scream-crying, the TV has been shut off. I'm not sure who did this or when, but as I stand with my face pressed against the screen door, I know that Alex Trebek is no longer part of our debacle.
I want to make it clear from the beginning that it is difficult for me to talk about complex trauma and grief from the inside out. It weaves itself in patterns that at times feel obvious and invisible and embarrassingly naïve. Shame is thicker than tractor oil, and although I will share things, I can already tell you that it is not without some level of regret. I ask that you carry this understanding with you and that you tread lightly.
I anticipate that you will come back to my work over time, and your understanding of it will change. I hope for you there are swerves and detours that ask you to address your own senses of loss, though I hope they're not as ubiquitous as my own. At the core, I have learned that complex trauma or C-PTSD describes, ad nauseam, where I am, so we should begin with this same central understanding.
Complex trauma is a disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experiences of relational trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape. It describes exposure to multiple traumatic events to children, which are "often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure. These events are severe and pervasive, such as abuse or profound neglect."[2] These experiences typically happen early in a child's development with a caregiver and impacts the child's formation of self, and disrupts their ability to form stable attachments. My experiences growing up and the negative reverberations align with empirical descriptions like the one below:
Children whose families and homes do not provide consistent safety, comfort, and protection [who] may develop ways of coping that allow them to survive and function day to day. For instance, they may be overly sensitive to the moods of others, always watching to figure out what the adults around them are feeling and how they will behave. They may withhold their own emotions from others, never letting them see when they are afraid, sad, or angry. These kinds of learned adaptations make sense when physical and/or emotional threats are ever-present. As a child grows up and encounters situations and relationships that are safe, these adaptations are no longer helpful, and may in fact be counterproductive and interfere with the capacity to live, love, and be loved.[3]
And it would prove to be true that these adaptations to abuse, neglect and abandonment have become detrimental and no longer offer protection but act as barriers to living with love. This is a lot to reconcile, and my process-based practice has provided and continues to provide space for me to learn and unlearn the ways in which I am in the world.
Chapter Two
“And she said, losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow”[4]
I have a lot of questions about Tracey Emin and how she seems to have found her way through art. I’m less interested in the autobiographic content her work often splays, but rather my curiosity is directed towards how she’s been able to navigate and make a visual understanding out of trauma. This speaks something to me about the courage one could and perhaps should have in their work. Of her 2019 exhibition, A Fortnight of Tears at White Cube, she says that the “whole show is about releasing myself from shame. I’ve killed my shame, I’ve hung it on the walls”, [5] which is unexpected because she exudes the strength of someone who’s shed all of this years ago.
Fig. 1 Tracey Emin, How It Feels, video, 00:22:33, 1996.
It surprises me to think that she has to surrender and find this courage each time. Thinking back even twenty-five years to 1996 and her 22-minute video How It Feels (in which she talks to the viewer about how it feels to have an abortion), she provides a practical, instructional, procedural understanding about her experience. One of the differences between Emin and I is that she does remember her history, though, and a clear, albeit, anguished chronological order to her life. In Living a Feminist Life, theorist Sara Ahmed describes the act of remembering as a process of waiting:
I have been remembering; trying to put the pieces together. I have been putting a sponge to the past. When I think of my method, I think of a sponge: a material that can absorb things. We hold it out and wait to see what gets mopped up. It is not that memory work is necessarily about recalling what has been forgotten: rather, you allow a memory to become distinct, to acquire a certain crispness or even clarity; you can gather memories like things, so they become more than half glimpsed, so that we can see a fuller picture; so you can make sense of how different experiences connect. [6]
For Ahmed, remembering requires concerted effort, and even before we find seemingly lost memories, we already know we would like some of them to abate. My artmaking process mirrors this effort, and the pursuit of remembering is an embodied act. I work intuitively with a gut-based understanding—the materials always link back to memory remnants that reveal themselves like a slow developing Polaroid picture.
In Writing Hard Stories, the author Joan Wickerham describes an interview she had with a police sketch artist. In relaying the conversation, she says, “one of the things she liked about her job was that before meeting her, these people had to carry the memory of that face, but that once they gave it to her, she was hoping that maybe they could start to forget a little bit.”[7] Drawing from my own childhood experiences of emotional and physical isolation, the work I make is like giving myself a visual representation of what my body has been grasping onto for so long. When the work comes into being, it feels like part of me is able to let go of something previously unseen—it’s like finding something you always knew existed. In between Emin’s ever-present memory and her hanging of shame (I mean, don’t I just wish!), and Ahmed’s gathering of the long lost, there is disassociation[8], and it is here that I find myself. My creative practice involves a mode of embodied dissociation that sits between the emotional immediacy of Emin’s work and Ahmed’s process of gathering what has been lost.
I have struggled with periods of flashbacks, and while they have felt all-encompassing at the time, they have made only an incremental difference to my narrative. I am looking for Ahmed’s sponges and I am looking for Emin’s absoluteness of experience. In Bridging the Black Hole of Trauma, psychiatrist Sandra Bloom states that after some terrible or tragic occurrence it is:
common to recognize that people are ‘in shock’ – that is, they are acutely dissociated. As a result, they may not remember the terrible events that just occurred, or they may remember them but have no feeling about the events. […] Until recently, however, we have thought little about what it means to be ‘in shock’ most of one’s life – to suffer from chronic dissociation because of terrible things that have happened repeatedly.[9]
It is an odd sentiment when you recognize that you lack typical emotional responses to traumatic experiences—and to that end, to also be deficient in the dynamic scope that joyous occasions bring. As I continue to move ahead in my unpacking and unlearning, I also perceive the social awkwardness of not having the fullness of these emotions and the need to present as though I do to maintain social cues. Bloom continues:
through dissociation, we can deny important aspects of reality that are too disorganizing, too threatening to our own internal stability either individually or as a group. And yet, survival demands that we keep both sides of the contradictory information available just in case we should need it. In that way we know without knowing.[10]
In my work I am continually creating systems of organization which encompasses categorizing, formatting with grids, stacking, finding likenesses and putting things together. Doing so is a way to help work against dissociation and the disruption or lack of connection between parts of myself and the physical world. Allowing myself to make intuitive systems of support provides manageable spaces for frightening experiences—both past and present—to reside. These systems of organization also act as part of the process of knowledge gathering. Over the past year and a half, I have been creating groups of sculptural forms that reference visible and invisible elements of residential architecture and remnants of childhood memories. Through the use of the multiple in works such as Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too and Emovere, I am searching for systems of support, and with the use of repetition, trying to fend off ideas of scarcity and find a guarantee that there will be enough.
Writing about the relationship between phenomenology and architecture, Gaston Bachelard states that:
there is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul. […] Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed”. Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms,” we learn to “abide” within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.[11]
While I have always lived within myself, the disassociation I have experienced has certainly “closed doors” and concealed “rooms.” Having recently found and opened some of those doors, I can tell you that there is a lot of dust, but not all of it has settled.
Chapter Three
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”[12]
It was only during the pandemic, and perhaps because of it (restrictions on studio access and running out of space to keep making and storing sculptures in my small apartment), that I started drawing. In the drawings included in this exhibition, there is a playfulness in the shapes brought forward with the often-bright use of colour but not at a cost to their sensitivity. The floating forms that sit centred on the page conjure up almost recognizable architectural elements or FF&E.[13] The drawings are made with a mix of oil pastel, chalk pastel, graphite, watercolour, correction fluid, charcoal, pencil crayons and wax crayons—a thorough collection of odds and ends found in studio drawers. Because I’m not trained in drawing, the coming together of these images was an improvisational negotiation of mistakes—expecting the unexpected and having faith in maybe not the next mark made or the one after that but carrying on nonetheless.
Recently, I’ve started to think about how making the drawings is a sort of exercise of distress tolerance. They have given me space where I could quite immediately park half-remembered memories and flickering flashbacks without causing additional pain or making things worse for myself. Working responsively on similar size paper with materials I’m unfamiliar with and how my body needs to move through space to make these marks meant that I needed to accept the moment I was in without demanding that it be different.
Fig. 2 Carrie Perreault, drawings and Emovere, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
Fig. 3 Carrie Perreault, drawing #23, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 4 Carrie Perreault, drawing #28, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 5 Carrie Perreault, drawing #29, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 6 Carrie Perreault, drawing #30, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 7 Carrie Perreault, drawing #16, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 8 Carrie Perreault, drawing #38, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 9 Carrie Perreault, drawing #21, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 10 Carrie Perreault, drawing #20, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 11 Carrie Perreault, drawing #33, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 12 Carrie Perreault, drawing #34, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 13 Carrie Perreault, drawing #37, (left), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
Fig. 14 Carrie Perreault, drawing #22, (right), mixed media on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in. (38 x 56 cm), 2020.
The word emotion comes from the Latin emovere which means to move out, or to move through. In the origins there isn’t any trace of clinging to, or protesting passage, but instead allowing emotions to flow through. Emovere is a series of plaster sculptures that resemble archeological findings or plaque build-up. The twenty-four pieces that make up the work are plaster infills of HVAC duct registers, transitions and connectors. The casts are unpolished and imperfect—the rawness of the finishing and the softness of the muted colours allude to a space that is unbuilt.
Fig. 15 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (1, 2, 3), (left), drystone, 4 x 4 x 4 in. (10 x 10 x 10 cm), 4.5 x 4.5 x 4 in. (11.5 x 11.5 x10 cm), 5.5 x 5.5 x 4 in. (14 x 14 x 10 cm), 2020.
Fig. 16 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (27), (right), drystone, 11 x 4.5 x 10 in. (28 x 11.5 x 25.5 cm), 2020.
I came to these forms when I was in a small hardware store and saw the ready-mades stacked on the shelves. I was immediately excited by the objects and initially wondered what they would look like if they were opened up to lay as flat pieces of sheet metal. As finished sculptures though, there is a sense of quiet and femininity in these almost pliable-looking solid forms which typically provide passage for the transfer of air—hot or cold—to provide comfort.
Fig. 17 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (25), drystone, 7 x 7.5 x 10 in. (17.5 x 19 x 25.5 cm), 2020.
Fig. 18 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (10, 11), (right), drystone, 5 x 5 x 7.25 in. (12.5 x 12.5 x 18.5 cm), 4 x 4 x 6 in. (10 x 10 x 15 cm), 2020.
Fig. 19 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (14), (left), drystone, 8 x 4 x 10 in. (20 x 10 x 25.5 cm), 2020.
Fig. 20 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (19), (right), drystone, 11 x 4.5 x 10 in. (28 x 11.5 x 25.5 cm), 2020.
Fig. 21 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (24), (left), drystone, 13.5 x 7.5 x 5 in. (34 x 19 x 12.5 cm), 2020.
Fig. 22 Carrie Perreault, Emovere (8), (right), drystone, 11 x 6 x 6 in. (28 x 15 x 15 cm), 2020.
The process used to create Emovere finds kinship with Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost, a sculpture that has been described “as an attempt to ‘mummify the air in the room’”, making the invisible visible and brings forward memory.[14] Like much of Whiteread’s plaster work, Emovere are humble objects and a recovering of vacant spaces entombed in plaster as though to preserve them forever.[15]
Fig. 23 Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, Plaster on steel frame, overall: 269 x 355.5 x 317.5 cm (105 7/8 x 139 15/16 x 125 in.), 1990.
When I think about how Emovere relates to a domestic space, I think about systems of support—plumbing, heating, sewage, the interiors of walls—are unseen but without any of them the structure would not be habitable. If the dismantling of systems makes a house futile then I wonder what alternative possibilities might have existed for my family with the dismantling of gendered and psychological abuse. Sarah Ahmed talks about the structural as personal and that you can be:
hit by a structure; you can be bruised by a structure. An individual man who violates you is given permission: that is structure. His violence is justified as natural and inevitable: that is structure. A girl is made responsible for his violence: that is structure. A policeman who turns away because it is a domestic call: that is structure. A judge who talks about what she was wearing: that is structure. A structure is an arrangement, an order, a building; an assembly.[16]
And so, I ask myself, does this whole house need to be burnt to the ground? The response is yes of course, but barring that, what else can be done? My answer, in part, is to formulate an experiential language for communicating personal trauma. Although it is often cathartic, using my work as a means of autotheory provides a framework that reinforces that the personal is political. Lauren Fournier defines autotheory as artwork that “points to modes of working that integrate the personal and the conceptual, the theoretical and the autobiographical, the creative and the critical, in ways attuned to interdisciplinary, feminist histories.”[17] There is no shortage of women telling their stories and being unequivocal about their experiences.
So much of what I do is just doing,[18] which for me is a process of “using the body’s experience to develop knowledge”,[19] or what Jessica Stockholder refers to as a different kind of thinking:
Your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate. What’s intuition? It’s a kind of thinking […] and so I think there’s a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together.[20]
Interconnected with this way of working one can often feel pressure to become an expert at whatever we attempt and to become one as quickly as possible, but I reject that expert positioning in the work I make. I’m not talking about imposter syndrome, but rather the reason ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin word for love. We need to do something for the simple love of the thing and making artwork is, in many ways, an exercise of the heart.
We won’t ever feel the storm is a pause of sorts—a reminder that everything is in transition and that you’re never long enough in one place not to be transitioning. To make this work, I gathered various components of eavestroughs and explored multiple configurations. Like Emovere, I used the readymade objects as molds and filled them with drystone plaster mixed with pink pigment to create the sculpture. I choose to use the colour pink as a reference to both the pink insulation in the attic of my childhood home and memories I have associated with that and as a reference to the interior of the body and, in particular, the stunting of neural pathways. This work consists of five very similar eavestrough arms. The main downspout connects to different elbows on each end—one lying horizontally and directed left and one that points down to the ground and bears diagonal weight. The ends with the flat elbows rest a few inches on a supportive riser made from plywood reclaimed from the interior of another artwork[21]. Lined up, the eavestroughs then extrude into space; I think of these extensions from the platform as prosthetics in a way, and like Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne,[22] they are reaching out for love. If connected to gutters, these structures wouldn’t function as the water flow would feedback into the foundation instead of escorting the water away from the home. What they do succeed in doing is transitioning exterior space into interior space while putting a cap on the flow of tears.
Taking mass-produced objects that are designed to help a building “function” and turning them into sensuous, animated and intimate objects also speaks to the way that sculptor Jill Downen’s work functions alongside:
architecture as a body with a life of its own. Making connections between the constructed environment and human forms, her work reveals unspoken notions about the self as a physical and cultural body. Downen asserts that both bodies and buildings possess strength and power, and both are at the same time vulnerable, reacting to the natural forces of decay and gravity. Her primary material, plaster of Paris or powdered gypsum— used in casts for mending broken bones and for making sculptures— refers to building, covering, and repairing.[23]
Fig. 24 Carrie Perreault, We won’t ever feel the storm, drystone, pigment, wood, 96 x 112 x 11 in. (244 x 2825 x 28 cm), 2021.
The making of Tire happened like most of my work in an intuitive exploration of readily available materials. To create them I mixed small batches of drystone plaster, water, and black powdered pigment into a pancake batter-like consistency and then poured the mixture into a hole I had cut out in an old bicycle tube. Once the tube is full, I use a funnel to top up the plaster where the insertion hole was made and then bandage the open gash with duct tape before it erupts like a volcano. Working fast with unfamiliar materials means that there’s often an element of crisis management in the making. I then shift the tube into an irregular shape causing folds like creases you might find in a pant-leg. The type of plaster I use has a set time of about 8 minutes, so it’s imperative that it comes together quickly. The plaster is sensitive and picks up small seam markings and the talc powder inside the tube, leaving the final results to look like ghostly echoes of a support system that no longer holds. The plaster tires are then stacked in groups of five or six and supported and cushioned with discarded and abandoned upholstery foam.
Fig. 25 Carrie Perreault, Tire, drystone, powdered pigment, upholstery foam, (individual units) 30 x 30 x 1 in. (76 x 76 x 2.5 cm), 2020.
When I sit with the work, I remember the year I had learned to ride my bike without training wheels. I was coming back home, around the curved bend opposite the park, when a car cut the curb and jumped across the street, drove across driveways and lawns and smashed into the corner of the brown brick house a few doors down from our own. I was startled and scared by the close call and cried the rest of the way home as neighbours stood outside barefoot in the grass. Inside the house, I sat on the third of the four steps that separated the living room and bedrooms and despairingly cried. Some of those big feelings became more pronounced that day, and some of them have never left. My chest cavity arches and aches with an understanding that death is on its way, and I hold hope and make a concerted effort that some of what I do matters and that in the end, I will be counted. These sculptures become (anti)“monuments to the loss of that place of safety”.[24] I inhale…exhale, and recall a poem by Adrienne Rich:
Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.[25]
How many times did you give all your love? emerged after more than a year of experimenting with asphalt. It’s a compelling material that remains in a flexible state, which was problematic as I spent months trying to build up strata layers of it along with cotton balls, rubber latex, plywood and plexiglass. On a hot day last summer, just down the street, they were repairing the road with trucks of asphalt being shovelled off and a single drum roller. I stood and observed their technique for several minutes, trying to figure out exactly why my materials hadn’t solidified even after sitting in forms for six months. One of the workers told me that my project would never dry to a solid standalone form. He said that if I came back to this patch job even two years later, I could easily enough dig a shovel into their repairs and the whole thing would come undone—the asphalt would lift and become a fluid-like material again. Surprised, I asked, “but then what’s the point of doing all of this if it’s not a definite fix?” He said it wasn’t up to him to decide how the roads are repaired.
Maybe the problem isn’t with the asphalt, but with my own, and perhaps even our collective, expectations of its properties and function that aren’t actually inherent. When I see potholes being filled in, I automatically assume that they’re repaired and not just bandaged. There is a parallel here between this material expectation of strength and finite and how we’re disciplined to think about trauma with the model of cure.
Fig. 26 Carrie Perreault, How many times did you give all your love?, asphalt, resin, paper, (individual units), 12 x 12 x 6 in.
(30 x 30 x 15 cm), 2020.
In Griselda Pollock’s After-affects | After-images the author explores whether artists make work that travels away from or towards trauma:
Bad things happen to individuals. We should try to get over them. Time will heal. They are in the past. We must move on and let go. […] The problem is that trauma, as we now understand the wounding of the psyche by an extreme event or by accumulated suffering, is not like that. When we borrow trauma as a term for personally affecting psychological shocks or as a metaphor for historical events that exceed existing representational resources, we also confront a problem that will not sort itself out by itself. The point of trauma studies is the necessity for individuals and for cultures, in different ways, to confront the ‘wounding’ that, according to our theories of trauma, engenders symptomologies such as the compulsion to repeat and act out. Trauma possesses and inhabits us.[26]
This artwork has now sat as is since December 2020, and when I moved the bags in the studio the other day, there was no shifting of materials. I dropped them from waist height, and the asphalt still did not move. It sat there pretending to be a solid but I now know from experience that with a probe, the material would come away from itself again.
Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too is a large-scale wall installation of discarded bicycle tubes. They are hung horizontally in single file along two gallery walls on black steel pipes attached to floor flanges and black iron fittings. The work feels emotionally weighty and is viscerally reminiscent of a feeling you can’t quite place. There is a figurative and bodily way that the exhausted tubes hang like discarded body bags, and the multiple emphasizes something recurrent. This work is installed at 5 feet high, which aligns with the top of my shoulder and acts as a physical barrier—a protector, between me and the wall. The installation occupies most of the left-hand wall at 48 feet in length and continues across just over half of the back wall at 22 feet, where it ends mid-way. The height of the work also delineates the horizon line in the gallery, with all sculptural work sitting no higher and the drawings elevated above this point. Keeping the work physically low is an extension of my need to keep it close to me and protected—under the radar.
With Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, I am reminded of both the way that children use their whole bodies to sometimes exaggeratedly move through space and would play and find this work useful in breaking their falls, but also of the ships along the Welland Canal where I grew up being docked and their sometimes bouncing, and sometimes chaffing along the tyre fenders suspended along the wall. You speak quietly when you are near this work and for a good reason. Being here is a revisiting of the past which has been kept relevant because it’s been kept secret.[27] I, too, am full of secrets that haunt and “if the past is something you were not allowed to talk about, it becomes terribly important.”[28]
The viewer in this exhibition is encouraged to make a material connection between this work and Tire which sits on the gallery floor near where the tubes on walls stop. These plaster renditions are more so a “ghostly double of something in the real world,”[29] whereas this piece, as it hangs on the wall, is a de-familiarization of a familiar object.
Fig. 27 Carrie Perreault, Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, (left), rubber, black iron, black steel, 840 x 62 x 10 in. (2134 x 158 x 25 cm), 2021.
Fig. 28 Carrie Perreault, Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, (detail), (right), rubber, black iron, black steel, 840 x 62 x 10 in (2134 x 158 x 25 cm), 2021.
In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk researches connections between the brain and the body in relation to trauma and healing. After examining the root causes and the consequences of trauma he describes the physiological effects that continue to emerge after the fact:
Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.[30]
Studies have shown that the Broca area in the brain, which is responsible for the formation of spoken and written language, goes offline when flashbacks occur, and without it, one simply cannot put thoughts or feelings into words.[31] The brain’s response to trauma is the same and can overlap with the effects of physical lesions caused by strokes.[32] In this way, “trauma colonizes its hosts by its persistent inhabitation of a subject who does not, and cannot, know it. It happened but I do not knowit — that it happened or what it was that happened.”[33] With more than half my life unremembered because of long bouts of chronic disassociation caused by abusive and neglectful actions that took place during childhood (and beyond), there were and continue to be “eventless event[s], unremembered because, being never known, [they] could not be forgotten.”[34] And so why this need to make work—or find it? Why does my doing so feel like a survival mechanism at times? Griselda Pollock also asks:
[…] how can a formal, intentional act of creation of knowledge address trauma: that which is unknown, unremembered and without time? Why would artists be inclined to do so? In an essay ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’, literary theorist, Geoffrey Hartman writes: Traumatic knowledge would seem to be a contradiction in terms. It is as close to nescience [unknowing] as to knowledge. Any description or modelling of trauma, therefore, risks being figurative itself, to the point of the mythic fantasmagoria.[35]
My practice is always searching (and wanting to harvest and make meaning) out of those ever-knowing and unknown experiences using physical objects to structure and create an experiential language that helps me uncover parts of myself. This current body of work uses the “trope of home as a fractured, fragile, or otherwise unsettled space of impossible inhabitation. […]
Home figures as a silent, incomplete, and unstable witness to loss – a ‘mansion of sorrow’”.[36] Through the act of creation, I am looking to reclaim myself, and in some ways, use what is always labour-intensive and process-driven work to fill a void. I am hoping my work reverberates like secret sound waves for those with experiences like myself—sharing what took me so long to understand.
Fig. 29 Carrie Perreault, We won’t ever feel the storm, Tire, Emovere, and drawings, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
Fig. 30 Carrie Perreault, How many times did you give all your love?, Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, We won’t ever feel the storm, and Tire, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
Fig. 31 Carrie Perreault, How many times did you give all your love?, Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, and We won’t ever feel the storm, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
Fig. 32 Carrie Perreault, How many times did you give all your love? and Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
Fig. 33 Carrie Perreault, How many times did you give all your love? and Sometimes I Think I Lost My Guts Too, Installation of Pacing the House, Waterloo, ON., 2021.
[1] Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”, recorded 1967, Columbia Records, track 1 on Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1967, vinyl record.
[2] Sarah Peterson, “Complex Trauma.” The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, May 25,
2018. https://www.nctsn.org/what-is-child-trauma/trauma-types/complex-trauma.
[3] ———.“Effects,” The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, June 11, 2018,https://www.nctsn.org/what-is-child-trauma/trauma-types/complex-trauma/effects.
[4] Paul Simon, “Graceland”, recorded October 1985 — June 1986, Warner Bros, track 2 on Graceland, 1986, compact disc.
[5] Harriet Lloyd-Smith, “Tracey Emin Lays Bare Her Own Traumas in Piercing New Show.” Wallpaper*. Wallpaper*, February 9, 2019. https://www.wallpaper.com/art/tracey-emin-a-fortnight-of-tears-white-cube-bermondsey.
[6] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017), 22.
[7] Brooks, Melanie, and Joan Wickersham. Essay. In Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma, 45–55. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017, 54.
[8] Dissociation is “a disconnection between a person's sensory experience, thoughts, sense of self, or personal history. People may feel a sense of unreality and lose their connection to time, place, and identity. Dissociation disrupts four areas of personal functioning that usually operate together smoothly, automatically, and with few or no problems:
Consciousness
Identity
Memory
Self-awareness and awareness of surroundings