ECHOES OF THE UNSEEN. 2025

Echoes of the Unseen is a mirror that questions the act of seeing, not as something neutral, but as a site of conflict, concealment, and survival.

It asks what it means to meet one’s reflection when the body’s truths remain unseen. How do we reconcile the image in front of us with what the body silently endures?

Informed by personal experience and the research behind Crip Time Clock, the work refuses the easy alignment between appearance and reality. The mirror becomes a charged surface. It reflects, but it also distorts, withholds, and unsettles.

Its form evokes a partial body: an ear, a footprint, a trace of presence. Soft textile forms push out from beneath a hard aluminium skin, stitched, stuffed, and bound in surgical mesh. The mesh both supports and restricts, echoing the way chronic illness is often managed, contained, and kept out of view.

Pearls sit within the fabric like small, tender traces. Formed around irritation, they speak to the way a body learns to protect itself, to adapt, and to continue. Their presence softens the wound without erasing it.

Although physically intact, the mirror appears marked, stretched, and unsettled by what it holds. Its surface invites a slower gaze, one that accepts partiality, interruption, and ambiguity. Here, looking is not the same as knowing.

The work gestures toward the quiet effort of sustaining oneself under pressure. It acknowledges bodies that ration 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 Geographies of Pushing by Dr. Elisabetta Crovara, delivered at the 2025 Institute of Australian Geographers Annual Conference. The paper explores how chronically ill women working from home both push through and push back against expectations of visibility, productivity and constant availability.