Description
One piece with a four-page poem, unframed.
16 x 20 inch (h x w)
Mixed Media on Canvas With a Poem on Paper
Artist Statement:
For intersex adults who have experienced invasive forced medical interventions, it is common for a significant portion of their childhood to have been spent in medical settings such as a children’s hospital. My work titled “Home is a Children’s Hospital” is a re-examination of this experience as storytelling told through a single visual artwork and an accompanying poem. The multimedia visual artpiece utilizes imagery of an intersex adult’s actual childhood medical records juxtaposed beside both medical supplies and children’s toys and stickers to represent the medical community’s attempt at the normalizing of these traumatic experiences for intersex children. The accompanying text is an amalgamation of 3 intersex people’s experiences turned into a fictionalized poetic story utilizing the medical records presented in the visual artpiece, the recalling of my own experiences with forced invasive exams in childhood, and an intersex adult’s anecdote of the day they acquired their own medical records. This piece is a way to provide an adult understanding and voice to our child selves in an attempt to challenge the current and former medical models of care for intersex people, educate the viewer, and incite an outrage that may develop into active allyship.
