A Body of Footnotes

A Body of Footnotes is an artist book about the challenges that chronically ill individuals face in the workplace and as human beings more generally. The book contains my curriculum vitae (or resume) annotated with footnotes. Using the form of the CV, I present my educational and career “gold stars” along with visuals footnotes of how those accomplishments were memorialized in my body and in my memory, through daily activities, rituals, and routines. Thus, I present “an epic representation of the intimate” as experienced through my pink-collar labor. The CV, coupled with the footnotes, presents labor alongside the contemporaneous, parallel reality, reaching backward and forwards in time and including interruptions and pauses. The CV is a public-facing document, but the footnotes are biographical and designed to interact with my audience and demonstrate how my illness overlapped with my career. 

The footnotes contain a collection of extreme connect the dot-to-dots. An extreme connect the dot-to-dot is a puzzle activity based on the original children’s game but made more challenging for adults. Completing an extreme dot-to-dot requires patience and focus to connect hundreds of numbers to create the outline of a simple image. I have produced a series of extreme dot-to-dots to represent the objects that I must remember to start my day: keys for my car, keys to use in my office, lunch, phone, laptop, and notebook. Creating these extreme dot-to-dots involved an absurd and complicated process of photographing, tracing, completing, modifying, verifying, and correcting (the process is documented in video). The process resembles the absurdity of my morning routine where merely getting out the door—even before I arrive at work—is tedious and requires concentration. Namely, I must concentrate on remembering mundane objects. If I forget any of these objects, the day is virtually ruined. My dot-to-dots represent routine domestic and professional labor, where tedium, repetition, and deep concentration go hand-in-hand to create a level of exhaustion, disproportionate to the final product.

Additionally, the footnotes to my CV include paper dolls produced from stills of images of me in the act of cartwheeling (video documenting cartwheeling). Underlying the humor and play of an adult cartwheeling, I am exploring ways of visualizing the invisible. Here, the unseen is the adult, middle-aged, diseased female body engaged in physical movement, remembered from childhood. Taking this concept further, what does dressing and accessorizing this female body, with her invisible characteristics look like? Literally and figuratively, she is right-side-up and upside-down (as in a cartwheel).