The Good Hurt
‘The Good Hurt’ discusses a relationship between photographer and sitter, artist and model, and husband and wife, drawing on my own marriage and the shifting roles and emotions I documented as it unfolded.
In collaboration with my (now ex) husband, I aimed to address the struggle for control in our relationship through 'tests of love' agreed through trust, negotiation and compromise. I expressed adoration and celebration of his body, exploring its materiality and surface, whilst he demonstrated his devotion by enduring mild discomfort and humiliation. These experiments began gently, softly; however, each 'victory' pushed me towards increasingly demanding and challenging acts.
Partway through the project, my husband was unfaithful, he stopped participating in the work, and the balance of power between us shifted. The work changed with him. In place of the sitter, I hand-sculpted and cast versions of him. These became a site for my anger as the adoration gave way to frustration and resentment. These sculptures were subjected to increasingly aggressive acts, and humiliation he was no longer present to receive.
I believe these acts gave form to an anger I could not express elsewhere. It was anger at the betrayal, realisation that my partner did not fit the mould or bear the form, naively, I had wanted for them. Each time he emerges from my mould faultless, and my acts of 'art-making' deface him until he is not recognisable, while he himself is free of my hand. The camera, and the process of art-making, perhaps granted me space for anger that everyday life did not. I am interested in who is permitted to express anger within a partnership, and how that anger can be displaced or transferred when the person it is meant for has left the frame. Looking back, I believe I was documenting the complex feelings of a relationship in deterioration, and that what began as devotion became, in part, a record of anger and grief.
For a long time, these images and the emotions expressed felt uneasy and shameful. Only now, with distance, I am able to take ownership of the work, and the anger it holds, as my own.