preamble

I came to preamble through clinical work. As a pediatrician, I sit on the side of the exam-room threshold where another person's selfhood is being held — sometimes briefly, sometimes for months — by people who are not them. Family. Nurses. Friends who answer the phone. The patient is not less of a self when ill; the self is just temporarily distributed.

The drawings are oil on butcher paper, ten feet tall. Butcher paper is what wraps food on the way to a table; it's the substrate of the kitchen, the daily body. Scaling it to ten feet pulls it out of domestic use and into the body's monumental register. The two pedestals — one white, one black — mark the two thresholds the patient moves between.

Preamble proposes that illness is not an event inside one body. It is a temporary dispersal, and the people who hold the meaning of the dispersed self — including the artist, the doctor, the friend — are part of the body that is healing.