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 both personal experience and qualitative research into chronic illness and remote labour, 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. These bulges suggest internal organs, cysts, or scar tissue; they are sites of pressure and resistance. The surgical mesh, a direct reference to medical interventions, both holds and constrains, echoing how chronic illness is treated: managed, contained, invisibilised.

Pearls embedded within the textile forms offer a quieter metaphor — tiny scars formed through irritation, markers of adaptation and care. Like the body, this work is always negotiating softness and structure, exposure and retreat.

This is not a broken mirror. It is a fractured one — unsettled, unwhole, deliberate. It makes room for contradiction: between being seen and being understood, between presence and withdrawal. Informed by feminist and crip methodologies, it resists dualisms of visible/invisible, functional/broken, public/private. It is a surface where the aesthetics of care — intimate, repetitive, slow — collide with the cold geometry of visibility.

In Echoes of the Unseen, to look is not to know. Reflection becomes an encounter with absence. The piece holds space for the politics of pushing back — for bodies who self-regulate their exposure, who mute their pain on video calls, who type while lying down. It materialises the invisible work of managing wellness, of remaining ‘present’ while resisting the demand to perform wholeness.

Echoes of the Unseen was included as a visual and conceptual anchor in the academic paper “Geographies of Pushing” by Dr. Elizabeth Crovara, presented at the 2025 Institute of Australian Geographers Annual Conference (IAG). The paper explores how chronically ill women working from home negotiate visibility, concealment, and the politics of productivity—offering a powerful resonance with the themes embodied in this work.