Julia Cserveny

In November 2020, I was hospitalized with an infected ovarian cyst, measuring 13 cm in diameter. The healing process has taken months, abstracting so much of the way I see the world, and see myself. When something happens in your body, you are stripped of the luxury of ignoring the things that bother you. At the same time, you are so close to the problem that you can hardly make sense of it. Through art, I have been exploring what this experience has meant to me.

I have worked from images taken with a microscope extension for smartphones, borrowing from the visual metaphor of literally being too close to a problem to decode anything meaningful. Each image is of an item or feature which refers to aspects of my medical experience, presented in an order which is chronologically relevant to me. I reproduced each picture digitally and present them here as animations, showing the accumulation of layers made in the process.

Using the conceptual framework of microscopic images, and borrowing links to biological implications, I have aimed to tell my story in a detached manner. Every layer builds upon the last, as each image builds on the meaning of the last, and as a whole the project means something different than its single parts. Health issues do not follow reason or structure, and the experiences they create are highly personal to the individuals they affect. Barring semi-explanatory titles and this statement, I have tried to limit the inclusion of my own interpretations of the experience, to allow the abstract nature of situations such as mine to be the overall theme.

This series contains 13 works, one for each centimeter that grew inside me without my knowledge. In each work, the layers grow on top of each other, seemingly at random, to form images that are just as abstract as they began.