The Invisible Made Visible: a visualization and writing workshop with Lia Pas

Thursday 26 October (5.30-6.30pm)

The symptoms of chronic illness are often invisible and unmeasurable by those not experiencing them. In this workshop, Lia Pas will lead us through the process she uses to create her symptomatology embroideries. Using a combination of anatomy, collage, mark making, and visualization, we will create symptomatology maps to invite viewers to sense our own symptoms. We will then work with abstruse medical texts, reframing, rewriting, and reimagining their meanings via homophonic translation to further deepen the evocation of our symptoms.

Please have a printout of a full body, organ, or organs, coloured pens or pencils, and a printout of a paragraph related to your chosen images that uses dense scientific language. All visualizations will be done gently. If you are uncomfortable with body-based visualization, the exercises can be done focusing only on your hands. For this option your will need a tracing of your hand, and a paragraph about the hand from Gray's Anatomy will be provided.

Bio

Lia Pas is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who works in image, text, and sound exploring body and states of being. She focused on performance-based work until 2015 when she became disabled with ME/CFS. Since then her work has focused on text and fibre arts with some small forays back into music. Her anatomy-themed and symptomatology embroideries have been shown in numerous online exhibitions and are part of the SK Arts Permanent Collection. She has published two chapbooks, vicissitudes (Underwhich Editions) and Husk (Jackpine Press), and one book of poetry, What Is This Place We Have Come To (Thistledown Press). Her videopoems susurrations and ossa.ora have been presented both live and online. A personal poetic essay about her embroidery practice is forthcoming in the anthology Sharp Notions (Arsenal Pulp Press) and her embroidered lung poem, she breathed, is featured on the cover. More about her and her work can be found at liapas.com.

The Invisible Made Visible: a visualization & writing workshop with Lia Pas