With Teethe
Investigates how the body communicates after neurological trauma, tracing the unstable relationship between sensation, perception, and language.
With Teethe is an ongoing multidisciplinary project emerging from my recovery after a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Through video, installation, wearable sculpture, publishing, and writing, the work explores how perception, sensation, and communication shift after neurological trauma, asking how the body speaks when language becomes unstable.
The Body as Signal
When cognitive language falters, the body often communicates first—through nerves, teeth, fatigue, and sensory fluctuation. With Teethe follows these signals rather than attempting to resolve them, creating space to observe how perception and communication change after neurological injury.
Teeth recur throughout the project as sensory instruments and thresholds of communication. In a video documenting a neuro-therapeutic exercise, each tooth is gently tapped with a Q-tip, producing sensations that range unpredictably from numbness to shock-like pain. The mouth becomes a shifting neurological landscape where sensation and interpretation blur.
The Zine: Repair and Record
This inquiry extends into a handmade zine that weaves together self-portraits, neurological test results, dental scans, and fabric imprints resembling bite marks. Hand-dyed pages and visible stitching evoke both wound closure and “brain stitches,” gestures toward repair that remain partial and ongoing.
Medical diagrams appear alongside tactile materials and personal imagery, placing clinical knowledge beside lived, embodied experience.
Monster Teeth
Questions of access surface through a wearable sculpture known as the monster teeth, cast from molds of my own teeth and worn on a metal chain. Referencing childhood vampire fangs, they function as both ornament and communication device.
When placed in my mouth during moments of distress, the teeth visibly signal that speech is difficult and that support may be needed—blurring the line between adaptation, boundary, and performance.
Night / Day
The video installation Night/Day explores perception through parallel footage of the same landscape filmed in daylight and darkness. Presented simultaneously, the environments register as distinct perceptual worlds rather than stable views of a single place.
Night magnifies texture and proximity while obscuring orientation, while daylight renders the terrain recognizable but equally subject to change. Together they suggest that perception is conditional, shaped by neurological, environmental, and relational states.
Writing and Disability
Alongside the artworks, I maintain an ongoing body of writing that reflects on disability, accessibility, and lived neurological experience within artistic and institutional contexts. These texts extend the project’s inquiry beyond the studio, questioning how disability is understood, represented, and supported within cultural spaces.
Selected writings can be found on my blog:
Ongoing Inquiry
Across media, With Teethe approaches disability not as a fixed identity but as an evolving sensory environment. Fatigue, overwhelm, and pain appear less as interruptions than as signals whose meanings are still being learned.
The project remains attentive to the shifting relationship between sensation, language, and care.
