Although a horrendous topic of chronic pelvic pain that is consuming much of Soula and Theo’s lives, it was no surprising creative response that Soula directed OoI to communicate her art and words into a book. Self-expression and the ability to extract it in a creativity form is an incredible catharsis, and in this case has produced an overwhelming artistic piece of work as well. The book is a culmination of fine art, design and personal experience with the chronic pelvic pain issue, Pudendal Neuralgia.

Here is the extract from Soula’s pudendalnerve.com.au post about Art & Chronic Pain – A Self Portrait.

“I didn’t see the point of creating a long description of my living with pain, sharing my tips, turning journal entriesinto a pain story. Afterall, first and foremost, before the person in pain, I am an artist… so my book had to contain many pictures and few words, just 32 pages in fact, but I believe it’s a complete story. It doesn’t hold the solution for PN but it’ll allow you to explain it to someone else, leave it on the coffee table, and it will be light enough to carry around. Above all I created it to express my experience so far and so that it is a bit of a companion to another PN family member. The idea was for the reader to feel empathy in a world where no one seems to understand, and to ease the pain as you look through it.

My marionette, Ms Soula, has been a great aid in helping me communicate my frustration with this invisible pain. Most of you would have read that a portrait I painted of her recently became a semi finalist piece for The National Doug Moran Portrait Painting prize. I’m happy that Ms Soula, is communicating my message. In the midst of being creative with Ms Soula (refer to blog post) I have found more ways to express my pain, they have formed this book.

I use drawings, sentences and phrases from my website, guided by your comments and emails to me, and used Ms Soula’s strings to document my pain journey’s ups, downs… and knots. I wanted this to be very special and with Theo’s help, it is. There is a dust jacket with real strings attached, one by one (thanks Theo).

There will only be 500 copies produced and they are all numbered by hand. The book won’t be released in an online format.