Zana Wensel | The Thread That Runs Through Me

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Zana Wensel, “Coming Undone (detail),” 2019

hand-sewn text on body suit, threads, spools (courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: Friday January 5^th, 7 -10 pm

Cellular memory (sometimes interchanged with ‘body memory’) is the theory that posits how memories can be stored beyond the brain, deep in our psychosomatic networks. Due to the ways in which traumatic events flood the brain’s memory receptors, cell memory refers to the ‘imprints’ trauma makes on the mind-body, and the impacts this has thereafter.

The Thread That Runs Through Me is a body of new interactive work by Zana Wensel, an Edmonton-based emerging multidisciplinary artist and art activist. The works explore the interrelationships between trauma and cellular memory. Through the artist’s combined use of text and image, she invites audiences into her own internal landscape, while speaking to threads that universally make up our physiological and spiritual composition. In doing so, the artist confronts and materializes her relationship with cellular memory as a form of catharsis and reveals several psychosomatic effects that arise as a result.

Using fabric and thread as metaphors of the body’s interwoven composition, the artist further communicates the sensory and palpable nature of cell memory, while mending the relationship with her cells in the process. At the same time, her predominant use of textiles and graphite compositions conveys a quality of what trauma can feel like without explicitly speaking to the events in which they derive from. Through her use of various analogue methods, the integration of the body within these processes becomes essential as it simultaneously inhabits and conceives these works as both conduits and forms of self-realisation. Through these means, the artist cultivates a space for herself to both reflect upon and release her embodied memories and offers these works as reflections on the fabric of our human existence.