India Lombardi-Bello

Soul to Squeeze

India Lombardi-Bello, Soul to Squeeze, 2021-22


Soul to Squeeze is a multimedia body of work that grapples with the uncomfortable transition from sickness to wellness. The artwork is drawn from my own experience with long-term ill- ness and recovery. With the visual language of meridians from Traditional Chinese Medicine, I tracked daily emotional and physical turbulence through meditation and cumulative drawing. Over the course of 9 months, I practiced meridian-based mediation and then intuitively drew on templates of my own body to create abstract- ed meridian representations of my internal landscape. I am interested in the invisible, liminal spaces within the spectrum of illness and wellness. I experience this transitional state as an internal squeeze or a growing pain that often goes unspoken. I explore this unspoken space to express the precarity and entangled nature of the body and mind during the process of healing.