Hybrid: “The Jaw is a Trapdoor” by Ashwini Bhasi
Artist Statement
I’ve been traversing the landscape of chronic pain and disability for most of my life and turn to art to make sense of the insensible suffering. I have found the complexity of the suffering that pain induces impossible to capture fully in one dimension, using a single medium. Pain is multi- dimensional, hyper-subjective, and defies definitions. It requires a multi-modal approach for translation.
‘The Jaw is a Trapdoor’ is an attempt to capture the multi-dimensionality of chronic pain. It has four inter-related layers:
(1) The drawing created in response to a pain flare-up
(2) The words spontaneously written within the drawing in response to the pain flare-up
(3) The audio recording of these words
(4) Fragments of the molecular genetics landscape of intense suffering caused by chronic pain and disability.
As a bioinformatician, the scientific part of my brain is drawn to understanding the molecular biology of chronic pain, while the artistic part of my brain yearns to explore the daily reality of existence in a pain-filled body and mind.
The shapes, words, colors and patterns in this work were created through automatism. Emotions, bodily sensations and perseveration associated with a specific pain flare-up were allowed to flow unfiltered from the limbic system to fingertips. The process acts as a form of raw release—a way to override the limitations of the analytical brain and its inability to expel suffering trapped in the mind and body.
The protein sequence fragments embedded in this work are from the GRIA1 [1], an ionotropic glutamate receptor [2] that plays a major role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain [3,4,5].
References:
AMPA Receptors Bring On the Pain. Neuron. 2004 Nov; 44(4):577-578.
Kopach O et al. Spinal AMPA receptors: Amenable players in central sensitization for chronic pain therapy? Channels (Austin). 2021 Dec;15(1):284-297.
De Ridder D. et al. The anatomy of pain and suffering in the brain and its clinical implications. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021 Nov;130:125-146.
Tao YX. AMPA receptor trafficking in inflammation-induced dorsal horn central sensitization. Neurosci Bull. 2012 Apr;28(2):111-20.
About Ashwini Bhasi
Ashwini Bhasi is a bioinformatician from Kerala, India who is exploring the somatics of trauma resilience, chronic pain and disability through poetry and visual art. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Variant Literature, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, RHINO and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the William J. Shaw Memorial Poetry Prize from Dunes Review and was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Center for Women Writers. Musth, the winner of the 2020 CutBank chapbook contest, is her first poetry collection.
