With Teethe is a multidisciplinary body of work that centers embodiment as a primary form of knowledge.
Emerging from lived experience with traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, and chronic nerve pain, the project
traces how perception, sensation, and communication transform after neurological trauma. When cognitive
language falters, the body speaks first — through teeth, nerves, fatigue, and sensory shifts. This work listens
to those signals and translates them into material, visual, and social forms.
Teeth function throughout the project as sensory instruments and communicative thresholds. In a video
documenting a neuro-therapeutic exercise, the camera records as each tooth is gently tapped with a Q-tip.
Sensation varies wildly — from numbness to shock-like pain — revealing the mouth as an unpredictable
neurological landscape. Here, embodiment is mapped not through metaphor, but through direct sensory

encounter. The body becomes both subject and site of investigation.

This embodied inquiry extends into a handmade zine that weaves personal and clinical imagery: 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,” referencing slow neurological repair. A
diagram showing how brain injury affects the entire body anchors the publication in embodied education,
linking invisible trauma to systemic impact. By combining medical documentation with tactile craft, the zine
asserts disabled knowledge as lived expertise. Personal narrative becomes a form of access — a way of
translating complex neurological realities into an intimate, relational understanding.
Access also operates socially through the wearable sculpture known as the “monster teeth.” Cast from molds
of my own teeth and worn on a metal chain, they reference childhood vampire fangs while emerging from a
different transformation shaped by pain and neurological overwhelm. When placed in my mouth during
moments of distress, they act as a visible signal that speech is difficult and care is needed. The piece
functions as an accessibility tool, ornament, and boundary marker simultaneously. By reframing
“monstrosity” as adaptation, the work challenges stigma around visible disability and reclaims difference as
honesty.
The concept of thresholds runs throughout the project’s video installation Night / Day. Identical natural
landscapes are filmed at night and during the day, shown simultaneously across multiple screens. At night,
close light reveals insects and textures in hyper-detailed, disorienting ways, while darkness collapses depth
and orientation. By day, the same spaces appear open, stable, and socially legible. These parallel
environments mirror post-TBI perception, where reality can oscillate between clarity and sensory distortion.
The body, like the landscape, becomes a shifting terrain shaped by changing neurological conditions.
Across media — textile, video, zine, sculpture, and essay — With Teethe positions disability not as a deficit
but as a distinct sensory and perceptual environment. The work insists that fatigue, overwhelm, and pain are
not interruptions to life or art, but forms of data that guide sustainable ways of being. This reframing
challenges cultural expectations of productivity and instead centers care, pacing, and interdependence.
Writing is a crucial extension of this practice. Essays published on my ongoing platform examine the politics
of access in contemporary art, critiquing how institutions adopt the language of inclusion without building
the structures of support to back it up. These texts connect personal bodily knowledge to systemic
conditions, arguing that accessibility must move from metaphor to material reality. Language here becomes
another threshold space — between lived experience and cultural discourse.
Ultimately, With Teethe proposes an art practice shaped by listening to nerves, to limits, to environments, to
social signals. By centering embodiment, insisting on access as relational care, and working at perceptual and
social thresholds, the project offers new sensory and critical languages for understanding chronic pain,
neurological difference, and the creative possibilities that emerge when we honor the body’s own forms of
communication.