Nicole's Story Behind The Artwork:

This artwork reflects my struggle with re-examining my past experiences and the healing process to “stitch” myself together.

It’s like finding the core of myself throughout myself or melding the different life events and stages into one person. Even though I know there’s the past, the present, and the future of course, these concepts of time can blur together. We’re constantly having thoughts about the past and the future every day. And with my PTSD, it’s been especially hard to draw clear lines between each. Each second or millisecond passes and becomes part of the past. The future becomes the present, with the passage of time. And then of course, the present becomes the past.

This artwork started with drawing a sketch of myself and taping pieces of old birthday cards onto the page. As I taped, I periodically drew over the tape to reemphasize certain lines in the portrait. This created a feeling of shakiness in a face and simultaneously, more depth and fullness as well.

This relates to the experience of being traumatized - to be shaken up, changed, disturbed by a past event and to continue to feel reverberations from the past. Yet, these reverberations also serve as entry-points to process my past and deepen my sense of self in the present.