“Reconstruction” Series

Between 2024 and 2026 she sought to sweep away the traces of the brain surgery she underwent through art, and completed the “Reconstruction” series. Reconstruction focuses on the process in which a neurologist-artist, diagnosed with a brain tumour located in her speech centre, became a case, an object, and with the support of artistic creation became a subject again. When her language falls silent, the artist uses art as a means of repair; filtering trauma through aesthetic discipline, she converts the passive experience of being a case into an active process of creation.

The series opens with a self-portrait begun as an act of self-care before any clinical diagnosis, in which the artist squeezes oil paint into her own IV drip in a hospital corridor. The break in the linear flow of time that came with the diagnosis is told through clocks without hands in a waiting room and through images of a paint palette that force time to flow again.

The experience of awake brain surgery is turned from an object of fear into “an image to be painted” and becomes an aesthetic motivation. The artist documents the process through her own eyes, on a plane where perspective is deliberately fragmented, letting the surgical drape over her head hang like a theatre curtain from three sides of the composition. The “objectification” deepened by post-operative aphasia is broken by colours seeping into the shadows of bandages and by a lettuce leaf stuck in the throat because of difficulty swallowing, which becomes an aesthetic focal point. Tragedy is given new meaning by being painted in vivid colours. Trauma is tamed by honouring that first smile where language ends and by a tender washing ritual in which the stitches are protected. Accepting destruction as fertiliser, this series is an original practice of becoming a subject again, reconstructing life through art.