Rosemary Eagle

 

In 2013 I started exploring the theme of pain in my artwork, in particular my experience of living with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). How do you explain pain that is so severe that it takes over your life? Words often seem inadequate but with art I can create a visual language to describe my pain and express my thoughts and emotions.

I have used a variety of symbols and graphic shapes which is how I visualise my pain; it is always hovering in the space around me, lurking overhead waiting to strike without warning, it strikes swiftly like a shot from a gun, the impact is penetrating, intense and electric. These pains often continue for hours and at their worst are accompanied by a severe throbbing pain that radiates deep into the foot.

Rosemary Eagle is a Melbourne-based artists specialising in printmaking and printed textile design. She uses her experience of chronic illness as a vehicle for her art, often taking forms in more intricately layered, fine-line designs such as etchings, drawings and monotypes.

Geometric shapes often appear in depictions of pain that is invisible, abstract, but not formless. The pain has a shape that connotes to the feeling it produces, be that round and endless or pointed and sharp. It's the easiest way to visualise something into actuality. Although the thought of pain as shapeless makes sense, it does have a beginning and and end, patterns and formations that you begin to notice the more you experience it. Eagle demonstrates this well in her work, and her different mediums through which she expresses chronic pain speak volumes of the correlation between the variations within a similar pain bracket, and the process of the experience as well. 

https://www.rosemaryeagle.com/art-about-pain.html