ECHOES OF THE UNSEEN. 2025

This mirror interrogates the act of seeing—not as a neutral gesture, but as a site of conflict, concealment, and survival. It asks: What does it mean to see oneself when the body’s truths remain unseen? How do we reconcile a reflection with what the body silently endures?

Inspired by personal experience and the research behind Crip Time Clock, Echoes of the Unseen refuses the presumed alignment between appearance and reality. In the digital world, where visibility is often conflated with value, the mirror becomes a loaded surface — a tool of distortion, discipline and erasure.

The form itself evokes a partial body: an ear, a footprint, a trace of presence. Its organic silhouette is interrupted by soft fabric forms — stitched, stuffed, and bound in surgical mesh — pushing out from beneath a hard aluminium skin. The mesh, referencing medical intervention, both supports and restricts, echoing the way chronic illness is often handled — managed, contained, rendered unseen.

Pearls embedded within the textile forms offer a quieter metaphor — small scars formed through irritation, markers of adaptation and care. Much like the body, this work balances softness and structure, revealing and concealing in turn.

Though physically intact, the mirror is marked — stretched, unsettled by what it holds. Its surface invites a slower gaze, one that contends with partiality and interruption. Informed by feminist and crip methodologies, the work gently unsettles familiar binaries:: visible/invisible, functional/broken, public/private. Here, the aesthetics of care — intimate, repetitive, slow — press up against the cool geometry of reflection.

In Echoes of the Unseen, to look is not to know. Here, looking offers no certainty. Reflection becomes a space of ambiguity — where absence, withholding, and layered presence coexist. The piece gestures toward the quiet effort of sustaining oneself under pressure. It acknowledges bodies that ration their energy, retreat from exposure, and resist the demand to appear whole.

Echoes of the Unseen was included as a visual anchor in the conference presentation of the academic paper “Geographies of Pushing” by Dr. Elisabetta Crovara, delivered at the 2025 Institute of Australian Geographers Annual Conference (IAG). The paper explores how chronically ill women working from home both push through and push back from work. Pushing back refers to both the spatial tactics of withdrawing from colleagues to conceal bodily pain and of pushing back against workplace norms and expectations of visibility and temporal availability— themes that resonate deeply with this work.