BREATHE IN BURN OUT

In this work, a single self-portrait is multiplied into a grid of 1,000 versions, each altered through collage, tearing, folding, and mark-making. Layers of ink, paint, and paper form a relentless rhythm — one that grows heavier through repetition. The work became a way to navigate the slow unmaking and reshaping of identity under the weight of burnout and early motherhood, reflecting on the cumulative effects of invisible labor and emotional rupture on the self.

The series began in the wake of a traumatic birth that left me temporarily paralyzed. In those early weeks, my body no longer felt like my own. The postpartum period, already fragile, tipped into collapse as it eroded control, certainty, and identity. Time fractured into endlessly repeating caregiving routines I could barely sustain, while my sense of self thinned under anxiety and insomnia.

Studio practice became a way to locate myself through process and repetition. The portraits emerge from an older self-portrait taken before pregnancy — not as representations, but as residues. Identity here is fluid, continually unraveling and reshaping itself. The initial photograph and all subsequent interventions remain in black and white, holding the work within a deliberately restricted visual register.

The grid, rigid and relentless, echoes the monotony of care: the daily repetition of tasks that go unseen and uncelebrated. Yet within this structure, every square resists uniformity. BREATHE IN BURN OUT holds the tension between the drive to keep going and the heavy weight of exhaustion. It is the breath caught between effort and surrender - the ongoing push to care and perform, even when the self feels stretched thin. Burnout is not an isolated experience; it is a quiet reality many carry, often unseen. This work names that exhaustion and holds space for the traces that refuse to disappear.

BREATHE IN BURN OUT, handmade artist book. Published by SPROUT PUBLISH

In the book that followed the installation, each page presents reproductions of the original sheets, displaying twelve fragments at a time and allowing the grid to unfold slowly and rhythmically. On the reverse, also photographed and reproduced in the book, traces of the process remain: pressure marks, bleed-throughs, tape, and ink stains. These reverse sides form a secondary body, registering the residue of strain, repetition, and collapse. Together, the recto and verso create a visual language of burnout, bearing the imprints and scars left by trauma and sustained exhaustion.

As the viewer turns each page, they enter a rhythm of repetition and rupture, effort and exhaustion, disappearance and persistence. BREATHE IN BURN OUT resists linear narrative, unfolding instead as a layered meditation on a self undone and reassembled—again and again—within the quiet folds of care, collapse, and the uncertain, ongoing work of becoming, both artist and mother.