The Colour of Unmaking
Hannah Robinson
Made in collaboration with visual anthropologist Victoria Baskin Coffey, this blended voice project is an effort to re-articulate the personal experience of a traumatic event through images and words.
It is a journey into the face of trauma, a way of looking and holding space for experience so that it can be held externally and interpreted in a meaningful and safe way, allowing for deeper reflection and the beginnings of healing. It is a method of using visual and written reflection as introspection, using photography and image making as a body/mind reintegration method.
This is a personal project created in the aftermath of a life changing accident that occurred in late 2019. A year on from the incident I began losing my perceived control, the numbing within became unbearable, the cracks appeared and life became unmanageable. My nervous system was in a constant state of fight, freeze, flee. At the most breaking point some deep intuition told me to pick up my camera.
I began consciously taking walks with my analog camera and using its technical aspects to temporarily disrupt the alarm signals in my brain. The act of making the photographs became a daily meditation, bringing back awareness to the body and quieting the mind. Having become numb; constantly anxious and nearing a mental breakpoint; reconnecting with image-making; through looking at life through a lens, was life saving.
This ongoing series of visual meditations were the catalyst for processing my PTSD. I also returned to the darkroom and found a further addition to this process. The act of working with film and the darkroom again was therapeutic; a circuit breaker which allowed me to start making my way back into my own body and mind. These processes alone were incredibly helpful in beginning to regain some regulation, but it was the further written co-creation and collaboration with my friend and Visual Anthropologist Victoria Baskin Coffey that created the space for the creation of The Colour of Unmaking - “an effort to re-articulate the personal visual essay as a form capable of revelation across registers of meaning, in this instance, revealing the architecture of pain through a meditation on the aftermaths of intermeshing worlds-in-crisis”.
“Whether personal or environmental, the aftermaths of catastrophic events never fully arrive or resolve. Here we find aftermaths located in the movement between the individual collective and a collective individual: eternally suspended in a dance between image-as-word and word-as-image”. - From The Colour of Unmaking by Victoria Baskin Coffey & Hannah Robinson.
And then, the creation of the project allowed me to externalise the experience in a way that was safe and accessible, look at it objectively and make space for capable revelation. It was later shared in a short exhibition inviting the community to engage with the work which, while personal, was also a reflection of a greater collective experience - echoed further by the blended voice reflection and piecing together created with Victoria. This was the sharing of many feelings and thoughts that I had been previously unable to verbalise, which opened up dialogue and a connection point to people’s own experiences and personal narrative. The original intention of this project was not healing, in fact there was no original intention of a ‘project’ at all, but through the act of making the work I was able to begin to do just that. I believe in the power this kind of work has for transformation and healing because I have experienced it myself.
