Title of project: Scars Artists: Lee Fearnside, M.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design Institutional Affiliation: Tiffin University

leefearnside@yahoo.com James Rovira, Ph.D. Drew University Institutional Affiliation: Tiffin University jamesrovira@gmail.com Scars transforms the persistent memories of severe trauma embodied in physical scars into mixed media works that combine poetry and black and white photography with one-minute sound clips. The three works completed so far, “Deer,” “Exodus,” and “Breathe,” record how individuals bearing scars view them as sites of personal reflection, hinge points upon which their past transforms into their present, and how a scar’s transformative potential can be more fully realized through a further metamorphosis into an artistic product. Because severe physical scars are the enduring memory of traumatic events that once shaped our lives, they have the potential to persistently force disturbing memories upon us. “How we remember” in the case of our scars is no longer a question of the availability of prompts for memory, which are ever-present, being inscribed upon our very bodies, but of the ways we can continue to actively shape and define memory through art and narrative as our memories of severe trauma have actively shaped and defined us. The two artists collaborating to create Scars work in film, photography, and poetry; the poet has recently published a monograph on William Blake, while the photographer has had her artwork shown in galleries across the country and her documentary film on PBS. For this project, the visual artist brought together her work in film with her work in photography to produce images that are at once art and archive, while the poet combined his poetry with his scholarship on William Blake to contribute both the epigrams and concepts about the integration of text and image. Together, they interviewed the subjects of these photographs and distilled these interviews into one-minute sound clips that capture the essence of the traumatic events first memorialized in living tissue and now in photography and poetry combined. “Deer” combines black and white images of a right forearm scar with a section of pavement to recreate both scene and aftereffect of a deer’s head crashing through the windshield of a car during an accident. The lines “I CAST MYSELF INTO THINE ARMS / AND SHINING RAGE” frame the photo top and bottom, while the line “INTO THINE STEEL ANGER” crosses the image itself in large, semitransparent text. The text suggests the deer’s point of view as it was chased across the road by hunters only to be hit by an oncoming car. Since the deer’s antlers came within inches of killing the driver, scarring the driver’s arm and just stopping short of his chest, the text dramatizes the deer’s death as its last, desperate attempt at justice.

A large, vertical abdominal scar juxtaposed against a hospital entrance combine to form “Exodus.” The words “Desire crept in / parting her womb / like Moses parting the deep red sea” fill a translucent, inverted, two-pronged white cross. The words both part and connect the two images the same way that this scar is a physical memory of the parting and rejoining of the sufferer’s abdomen. Title, image, and text pun on the Exodus story, associating the parting of the Red Sea with freedom and desire. This scar was formed by an emergency surgery that removed a sixteen-pound tumor from a teenage girl’s abdominal cavity. During this surgery she lost an ovary. “Breathe” aestheticizes and eroticizes the physical memory of thoracic surgery in which the subject’s ribs were parted and a portion of her lung removed to evacuate a cancerous tumor. The scar image overlaps, blends, and intersects with an image of a hospital parking lot. The words “When you are inside of me / I can breathe” evoke a sense of the intimacy, interiority, and penetration associated with surgery, and seem to float above and across the image as if her wound exhaled a feeling of freedom before being stitched shut. This wall-mounted exhibit requires approximately five feet of horizontal wall space and twelve inches of vertical wall space if the images are arranged horizontally, or approximately three feet of horizontal wall space and three feet of vertical wall space if arranged vertically. Sounds clips are optional; if used, the artists can provide either .mp3 clips for sound equipment provided by the gallery, or they can provide simple, unobtrusive wall-mounted .mp3 players with headphones. Image Inventory List

1. “Deer” (2011): 8” x 21”, framed digital inkjet print. 2. “Exodus” (2011): 7” x 15”, framed digital inkjet print. 3. “Breathe” (2011): 7” x 16”, framed digital inkjet print.