Rest Votives, Beer cans, cotton thread, Dog’s Mercury roots, silk

These votives were commissioned by MushMoss Collective for ‘A Quest for Rest’; an interactive, hybrid performance piece at Theatre Deli for The Social Model…& More festival, 2023.

These were all informed by research pooled between me and Mushmoss Collective on notions of rest experienced by sufferers of energy limiting chronic illneses (ELCI’s).

Notes on individual votives:

Good Morning Mr Punch

The first coffee in bed is the best moment of the day. Before the swamp sets in. Mr Punch is a fool and he lives like a ghost pulled from the Comedia del Arte, performing and re-performing for evermore. But the fool is curious and a trickster too… My Mr Punch is wearing a Misery Guts medallion (see Thank God for Misery Guts) and excreting his own sausages. But he is prickling and alive with potential, so much so his body is streaming into the atmosphere

Geographical Tongue with Dog’s Mercury Roots

I like weeds. These roots are from the most prolific weed in the shared garden where I live. I am new to gardens. But I love watching a plant that seems to find living easy. My heart aches as the neighbour weedkills them. They persevere none-the-less.

Tongues can tell you everything you need to know about a person’s health, and perhaps even more…their fortune, their future? Mine always feels sickly. This is the perfect amulet

Word Garlands

Words taken from the rest responses that didn't find their way into the other votives

Taproot

The elusive taproot to all sustenance, a lifeline, security, an anchor, at one, to the underworld

Mukbang in a Mangrove Swamp

I love the use of the swamp as a metaphor in A Quest for Rest. My friend had written an essay on swamps that I read in preparation for this project. My metaphorical main space is the sea, and I love the idea of the swamp as a parallel wetland. With and without tides, with and without salt. This page depicts a competitive clock-pie eating competition in a mangrove swamp

Waiting Room

Here we always are. For evermore.

Hairy Watering Can

A gift for Sven. I grow hair so profusely -my greatest act of enduring, unrelenting productivity

Hairy Leg

See above

My Right Shoulder Blade

I have a pain here that comes and goes. I forget about when it isn’t there. For survival.

Raeste

Etymologies of rest overseen by an ANT

Crash

Of all the vernacular language surrounding my own symptoms, crash is one of my most heavily used words. I have only really just realised that having a crash is not the same as resting and it accounts for the mistrust I’ve always felt of the idea of lying down as restful. Anyway, this is what lying down while crashing feels like.

ANT (Hare on a Mountain)

This ant on a sand castle is my hare on a mountain. I remember walking the schooI corridors in such extreme discomfort all over, my uniform hurt me and I used to feel like I had ants trapped in the elastic ribs at the tops of my socks. Tickling and itching and burning like the sand in my bed I bring home in the summers, now I live by the sea. I give thanks to the music of Shirley Collins for this and so many other worlds to live in.

More ANTs

When I was 14/15, as a very last resort at trying to explain my ‘difficult behaviour’ at school as I became seriously ill, I was sent to an NHS paediatric psychotherapy/occupational therapy department. I was told there that my problems were caused by my ANTs, or Automatic Negative Thoughts. My mum loves ants. She has a big photo of an ant in her hallway. And when she came on one of my first Beer Can Votives embossing workshops she made a giant ant. There is speculation that ants may represent the most populous species on earth and that they are extraordinarily resistant to radiation. Ants never quit, they only change their approach.

Together, mum and I have taken ants back, as a resilient, pesky, ubiquitous and resourceful guardian and mascot.

Over and Over

I have spent a significant percentage of my life in the grips of a severe, flu-like illness. It’s my Mr Hyde, werewolf state. My body becomes a vessel - a host for the drama of it and I am forced to play passive witness. It is a war, it is a barbaric violence. I am racked with fever and I become too frail to walk, to withstand noise or touch or light. I cannot think or speak. There is an explosive allergic response throughout me, my face, my airways, my organs, my guts, my skin. My bed is a boat and I am at sea alone, in a storm. I am left, after it has run its course, shipwrecked, weakened further for weeks.

Neck Eggs and Chest Crabs

Neck eggs and chest crabs is how I know my bug is coming again…

Thank God for Misery Guts

At sea in the storm of the bug, or floating in the boat of my bed, or wet with salt sea water sweat or cold in my bones and alone, cast adrift from the mainland for years. In whatever way the sea is being present, my work and the storytelling that surrounds it is the anchor I cast overboard to hold me in faltering stability.…. Misery Guts is one of my Death Mask jewellery charms and he has become a ubiquitous figurehead throughout my work

Live Response Embossings

Taking words and prompts from the online participants during A Quest for Rest I made two embossings live on the evening of the 22nd November. One shows critters amongst the roots of a mangrove- a reminder that even in the static sludge of the brain fog swamp, we have our rich imaginative ecologies with us, even if they are rendered temporarily dormant by our exhaustions. The other is a collage of imagery and words generated by the players and the game prompts.