Judith Schossböck — Bog Characters

“Pro­found ill­ness such as ME/CFS or a spinal CSF leak define and change every core of your exis­tence, every cell of your body, and they inter­fer with your brain in a way that is hard­ly imag­in­able for the aver­age per­son. When I start­ed to draw out of an impulse to com­mu­ni­cate the extreme trans­for­ma­tion I was going through, it would have felt extreme­ly weird to draw myself or my fig­u­ra­tive feel­ings as a clas­sic human being. So I came up with a frog or bog like char­ac­ter with an open burn­ing head or scalp, with green skin because I could­n’t iden­ti­fy with nor­mal healthy skin colour any­more, and with orange or/and red hair com­ing out of my brain, resem­bling nerves that are hurt­ful­ly pulled in many direc­tions, and most of the time emp­ty or yel­low eyes, and sev­er­al holes.
Lat­er on, this fig­ure extend­ed into a more detailed char­ac­ter and is reap­pear­ing as a vari­a­tion with dif­fer­ent accents in my work.”