The Weight I Bare

I was fitted for a back brace to correct my scoliosis when I was eleven years old. My family, doctors, and I decided a “soft” or “flexible” brace was the best option for me even though it was a relatively new form of treatment. The goal of this brace was to train my body and muscles to return to a “place of correction” after movement. Instead of forcing my bones into the ideal shape through a hard, plastic brace this one used elastic fabric bands to pull me back to an upright position. I wore that brace twenty hours a day, seven days a week for four years.

After years of art making, I turned my gaze from the external to the internal and began looking back to my physical and emotional trauma surrounding my years in the brace. I began first by making work centered around my chronic pain from my scoliosis and the lack of results from the brace. I expanded the work after in-depth research in which I found that women are ten times more likely to be braced during adolescence than men and that nearly every form of bracing had been invented by older men.

Through this work, I want to recognize my own medical history and the history of young women who have been through what I have experienced and so much more. I hope that this body of work illuminates this genderized patient population, outdated  treatment, and their flaws.

The above images are from an installation of the work in Liminal Space at Tufts University Art Galleries (Anderson Auditorium and Grossman Gallery) in 2019.

Treatment, a film by Helen Rose Driscoll. Featuring Helen Rose Driscoll as “Patient", Katie Lee Mansfield as “Nurse”, and Liz Maelane as “Nurse”. Music by Helen Rose Driscoll and Austin Covell. Edited by Helen Rose Driscoll. Directed by Helen Rose Driscoll. Director of photography by Keith Robitalle. Lighting design by Liz Maelane and Keith Robitalle.