Helen Rose Driscoll
Helen Driscoll was born in Stoneham, MA in April of 1997 and currently lives and works in the Greater Boston area. Working primarily in drawing and the moving image, she explores her own medical history as well as how time wears on her. Her past work has explored themes of feminism, the suburban home, the decay of vessels, and self-portraiture. Her work has been shown at W.M. Morris Hunt Memorial Library (2016), Yve Yang Gallery (2017), and "Running Late: Pop-up Performance Exhibition" (2019).
I was fitted for a back brace to correct my scoliosis when I was eleven years old. My family, doctors, and I decided a "soft" or "flexible" brace was the best option for me even though it was a relatively new form of treatment. The goal of this brace was to train my body and muscles to return to a "place of correction" after movement. Instead of forcing my bones into the ideal shape through a hard, plastic brace this one used elastic fabric bands to pull me back to an upright position. I wore that brace twenty hours a day, seven days a week for four years.
After years of art making, I turned my gaze from the external to the internal and began looking back to my physical and emotional trauma surrounding my years in the brace. I began first by making work centered around my chronic pain from my scoliosis and the lack of results from the brace. I expanded the work after in-depth research in which I found that women are ten times more likely to be braced during adolescence than men and that nearly every form of bracing had been invented by older men.
Through this work, I want to recognize my own medical history and the history of young women who have been through what I have experienced and so much more. I hope that this body of work illuminates this genderized treatment and its flaws.