This interactive sculpture invites the viewer into a dialogue about invisible impairments, imploring them to consider the many nuances of bodily pain and the innumerable different forms disability can take on within a person and within society. The title, “How would you rate your pain today?” is a question I’ve been asked countless times by countless doctors throughout my life. Each time I have found myself struggling to quantify the depth of my pain in a number between 1 and 10. This struggle to fully communicate my embodied experience with pain and disability extends to many other facets of my life from my conversations with friends and family, to public transportation. My physical appearance means that society at large perceives me as able-bodied and treats me as such. In order to receive the support I need, I have to be able to explain what’s going on within my body, and I feel like I come up short every time. With this piece, I take the viewer inside my torso, using multisensory objects to express the physical sensations I experience on a daily basis in the ways words and numbers always fail. The materiality of each element within the sculpture was carefully chosen through a series of meditations on individual parts of my body and making experiments, allowing me to align my hands with my head. Tactile representations include metal spikes as numbness and tingling, wool roving as brain fog, and more. To create a fully multisensory experience, I also included scent elements by soaking fabric in ash and white vinegar to represent smoking damage, as well as creating an audio soundtrack to represent my chaotic inner monologue. By interacting with these objects, the viewer is able to more deeply understand my bodily experiences.
