2025
In Collabration with Jason Houge and Mariah Moneduh
How does one heal in a society that demands silence? Most Sexual assault survivors often experience a loss of agency not only over their bodies but also over their emotions due to societal pressures (cultural, familial, and religious norms) that enforce silence and repression, expecting them to remain stoic about their pain. This enforced repression fractures the sense of self, severing the connection between body, memory, and emotions. As a result, many survivors experience gaps in their memory, an unconscious defense mechanism, and a conditioned response to the pressure to endure pain quietly.
Yet memory lingers, and as time passes, the body remembers even when the mind tries to forget, forcing the past into the present. It resurfaces unexpectedly, crashing into daily existence like a wave hitting the shore; sudden, forceful, and inescapable. This dissonance between forced suppression and the body’s persistent recollection, leaves survivors in a paradoxical state, simultaneously unfamiliar with their pain and yet haunted by it. What was once repressed is now impossible to ignore.
Ascendance is born from this remembrance. My artistic practice involves recovering, confronting, and healing from these resurfacing memories, questioning whether healing comes in repression or confrontation. Drawing on this, I use my body as both subject and medium, to confront my trauma directly, allowing myself to embrace the pain and adapt to it. Within my self-portraits, I represent the emotional struggles and healing journey of survivors, both destruction and renewal, pulling under and carrying forward. Submerged in water, my body exists in a liminal space, neither entirely lost nor entirely free, but in a process of transforming. Through this process, I take ownership of my body, and I assert autonomy by the refusal to be reduced to a victim, showing that my body is mine to inhabit and express.
We are taught that forgetting is survival, and that silence equates to strength. But does this pain ever become forgettable? And more importantly, should it be?
This work would not have been complete without the Kind and lovely collabration of Jason Houge and Mariah Moneduh .