Hannah Bullock | Toronto, Ontario
Hannah Bullock is an artist and writer based in Tkaronto. Her work uses material exploration and representations of her body to grapple with her lived experience with undiagnosed chronic pain. In Hannah’s current work, she uses a performative drawing practice to consider the possibilities of her bed as a workspace. She is interested in rest as resistance, intimate space (both physical and digital), the beauty in kinky pain when you have chronic pain, and, more recently, yawning.
Hannah Bullock's Banff Centre Studio. Photograph by Rita Taylor.
"I’m thinking about how yawning is perceived as an undesirable and uncontrollable function of the body: a vulnerability we’re taught to conceal and resist. Every time I yawn, the discs in my crooked jaw slip out of place, exacerbating my chronic pain. The more pain I’m in, the more exhausted I am. The more exhausted I am, the more I yawn. I can’t stop yawning because I’m always in pain, I can’t stop the pain because I’m always yawning.
I’ve started asking Google how to stop yawning because my doctors have run out of ideas. Google has bad bedside manner and diagnoses me with hysteria (and maybe also several other terminal illnesses).
I’m growing impatient with the labour of being a patient."
Hannah Bullock
Hannah Bullock, 'hysteria treatment': work in progress, graphite on paper, 25"x37". 2022. Photograph by Rita Taylor.
Hannah Bullock, 'how to stop yawning', graphite on paper, 25"x37". 2022. Photograph by Rita Taylor.
