‘Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge but as transformative recognition.’ Avery F. Gordon

The medium of exchange is remembrance. The work in Cares That Infest enhances the formation of the myriad permutations of my subconscious and its phantoms as I finally take care in dressing my insides in the same way I’ve learned to drape my outside. I was once inclined to believe my inverse paradise and my ghosts were made of glass, their fragility knotted together, neglected, overshadowed by empathetic entanglement with others.

My murmurillos are no longer consigned to oblivion: troops of reptilian grylli have emerged to the surface. Their skin has shed, tails are growing back. Drawing from my inclination to give fear a face, King Charles VI’s firm belief he too was made of glass, engaging with the past by way of haunting and memory debt as seen in Pedro Paramo, my co-walkers have been resurrected in the alternative coherence of my mind: whether made of glass or cloth they are now bulletproof.

My heroines are trespassers, their identity unchanged by their newfound force. The celebration of accidents in my painting, any smudging and imperfections brought by the intuitive nature of my process celebrates the complex and fertile terrain between strength and vulnerability. The shapes of my painted thoughts coagulate, spines on show, their back ends thrashing and wings spread to meet the many ways I’ve shared my plight with other women.

It was Laurette Séjourné who said Quetzalcoatl was the ‘central archetype in which humankind, sovereign in its decisions, manages to convert a perishable mass into luminous energy.’ Like the feathered snake I have set a brighter fire to the darkness. It is from the pits of kalon kakon that I begin my emancipation, enabling cares that have infested me to exist more beautiful by being outdoors.

In the wise words of Mexico’s longest-lasting tourist Leonora Carrington, ‘I realised how necessary it was to extract from myself all the personages who were inhabiting me […] I had to get rid of everything […] illness had brought me, to cast out these personalities, and thus begin my liberation.’ Thank you Mexico for helping me turn myself inside out and providing new ways to clean the place with Fabuloso.

 - exhibition text by Alexia Marmara