in 2008 i had a major nervous breakdown
for 5 weeks starting 2 days before my 19 day stay in the urban krankenhaus in berlin i tried to explain my self to my self through photography
using my oldest 35mm camera (that would pop open causing light leaks), i exposed each roll of film with with the the images my triggered mind was bombarding me with - they are a mix of self portraits, sexual self portraits, pornography, and pages from my diary - these images i variously and randomly over and under exposed before winding back the film to the beginning before reloading it and photographed whatever caught my eye whilst in and around the hospital while i was there and always on the long walks i took to try and find peace and burn off the adrenaline of the being perpetually triggered
i had no way of knowing where and when either the pre-exposed images or light leaks would show through or how they would interact with the images i was consciously taking
i did this intuitively to express the inevitability of old memories breaking through into and obfuscating the truth of the now
i understand now i was stuck in a ptsd trigger loop. i was visualising the experience of experiencing flashbacks without the language i so desperately needed to make sense of my experiences
i was hospitalised and yet the doctors at the time did not recognise what i now see to be quite clear symptoms
it was another 11 years of repeated and devastating panic attacks before i could add the word flashback to my vocabulary and name it and start to heal
having selected the images that made most sense to me, i brute forced them to the same height, regardless of their width and sellotaped them chronologically end to end and along the joins folded them flat into as compactly as i could before binding them as they lay. as a result, 'things get damaged' became a book measuring 25cm high and 95cm wide when closed - a book that is so ungainly that it doesn't conveniently fit on any shelf, instead, just like my trauma, it needs to be alternatively housed
once opened - to a width of approximately 190cm, the reader is challenged to negotiate an uneven liberello of a series of images poorly bound with ageing sellotape that demands concentration and care - over time, pages shift, sellotape slips and joins rupture - the act of unpacking the delicate state i was in that time causes further damage whether the viewer likes it or not
through the various linguistic shifts the english language has been through the word 'dream' has become abstracted from its german counterpart 'traum' and so has lost its shared etymological roots with 'trauma'
in this light the words of w b yeats seem appropriate
'i have spread my dreams under your feet
tread softly because you tread on my dreams'
tread softly because you tread on my dreams'
