Artist Talk -Tether 2026

Here within lies the transcript for my artist talk given on 3/10/2026

Hi, thank you for joining us tonight. For my talk, I’m going to let my video, which is a component of my installation, play while I speak. My name is Kamryn Rose and the first things to know about me are, I am an interdisciplinary alchemist originally from Tulsa Oklahoma. I moved here in 2021 to do the last two years of my Bachelor of Fine Arts with a Time-Based emphasis from Boise State University. I used to teach illustration and character design classes in Oklahoma, and I have 16 years of dance training and experience.

The second thing to know about me is that I live with a chronic illness. Looking back, I have always had this, though I wasn’t diagnosed until the summer of 2022. And I can tell you, I remember exactly where I was when we finally figured out what had been going on with me my whole life. I was in the veggie section of the big albertsons next to the Boise State University campus, when I got a phone call from my mom, who is a nurse practitioner, and asked “umm so, im looking at the diagnostic criteria for this one thing, have you ever dislocated anything, like repeatedly or without much pain??” I was like “umm no?” I mean what a weird thing to ask me. I called her back 5 minutes later “well… does it count if when I bend over my hip sorta pops in and out sometimes”  “uh yeah” that has happened my whole life. As long as I can remember. I had never thought anything of it. It was shortly after this that I was officially diagnosed with Postural orthostatic tachycardia (or POTS), which is a type of Dysautonomia and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (or HEDS). 

Dysautonomia is a fancy way of saying my autonomic nervous system, The part of the body that tells you to breathe, swallow, regulate temperature, and all of the things that happen subconsciously, doesn’t really work. When that part of your nervous system isn't working, just breathing becomes a conscious, repeated effort. And when these things become an effort to do, the vagal nervous system loves to try and tell you that you are in danger at least a little bit, all of the time. You can imagine then that it's a pretty exhausting way to live"

Along with the relief of an explanation, came an indescribable grief for the life I thought I would have. At the age of 23 I was getting IVs weekly, taking handfuls of pills every day, waking up at 6am to do my massage points and physical therapy before class, sleeping for 12 hrs on weekends, not seeing friends, using an obnoxiously loud rolling bag for school. If you know you know… the list truly goes on forever. 

And while in my own grief, I became viscerally aware of the institutional and social systems set up to push me out. Because I'm not visibly disabled, i “looked fine” to others. So my fatigue was seen as lazy, uncreative, not trying, not wanting enough. I wasn't enough. Other people who looked like me could handle this stuff, could “push through it” so why couldn’t I? Why was my exhaustion special?

This presented me with a really hard reality. I did not fit into this world. I turned to my art to grieve, making work about the routines, the breaking down of my body, the fatigue of being fatigued, and the exhaustion of trying to get better from something with no cure. I have always had this illness but the awareness became stifling.

When I graduated from art school I was hit with the age old question “what now?” I turned to peers, mentors, and teachers. Their answers were always the same, good faith answer,  “well… you could be a server or barista and do art on the side” on the side… they didn’t know. Didn't know how ableist that answer was. How gutted I felt.  How unachievable that was for someone who works fulltime at just existing. I was met with the fact that I had just spent 5 years getting a degree in something I could only do “on the side”. They couldn’t understand that there was no “extra” time in my day to do art. That their 24hrs and mine were fundamentally different. Despite that, I tried to “do art on the side” while I worked a job unrelated to my degree, which I didn’t care about. Sacrificing my health, because everything I do costs me, for something I didn't care about. I made no art during this time.

Needless to say, I was not well during that time physically, spiritually, or emotionally. I realized the world was simply not shaped for me. I will likely never live a truly independent life. I will need help despite how much I truly don’t want it.  And this brings me to the best advice I can give you. 

“Never get a chronic illness. It is really inconvenient for other people” 

You will need help when the people in your life have work, a party, a busy day, or just plain don’t feel like it and you will take that on, equally feeling guilty and mad at yourself for needing it in the first place. This is not a cry for pity. It is an ask for understanding, that asking really is the last thing we want to do and often the thing we need to do most

I took some time in the muck of this whole job thing asking myself  “how I want to live” and no matter how unachievable it felt I wrote it down. I wanted to make art. I missed my spiritual practice, and I wanted to have the flexibility in my day to accommodate the dynamics of my health.

I had been studying alchemy as a spiritual practice. Interested in the way it destills meaning out of experience and material through an intentional framework and practice. I wondered how I might apply this framework to my art. If it could be a good companion for my work looking at the body’s ability to hold memory, emotion, and stress and how that can affect the body’s physical alignment. 

On a whim, while I was trying to decide to go back to Oklahoma or try to stay here, I applied for the Show and Tell art residency with the intent that I would get rejected, but it would be confirmation to go home and maybe give me some direction. 

On a random sunday night some weeks later around 10pm on my mom’s couch I resigned from my job. I just couldn’t do it anymore. The next morning, I got a call from Alex, sharing that they would be thrilled to have me be a part of wave 3. 

During the residency, I worked to bring together my love for drawing, line, the body, and video while applying the framework of alchemy. Working consciously through repetition, iterating, and experimenting. I found clarity in failure. Each experiment failed yielded a clearer understanding about myself, the work, and the idea. I worked through the cycle of breaking down material, extracting its essence, and rebuilding in a new form of distilled wisdom. I explored materials broadly and through experimentation discovered new forms including lifting an image off of paper and onto wax.

I came to the idea of the spine as Tether. Connecting the physical and non physical planes through a central line. The spine is an intersection of bone, fascia and nerves, representing the material, spiritual, and energetic influences of the body.

The final work is a two part installation. In the larger room I have a more objective view of the spine as a Tether. Different materials exploring fragility, flexibility, and rigidness. Extracting the inner to the outer plane for contemplation. Four spines hang, made of either freehand embroidery on tutu mesh or paper covered in cracked wax. Video projection captures the movement of the spine as the hanging spines interject and echo into the projection. A charcoal drawing acts as an x-ray of how memory, energy, and fascia can affect the alignment of the bones and cause stress and pain on the physical level. 

In the window space sits a more intimate, emotionally driven piece. I invite you into a moment where an energetic release of the body takes place. I layer three drawings. The first represents the part of the body, the pelvis, being transformed, The next layer, a drawing of hands, represents the energetic intervention coaxing the pelvis toward the release of stuck energy, and The final a visual expression of the release of energy through the spine manifested as a candle.

This body of work has been me grappling with my illness in an attempt to transmute it. To make it mean something beyond unlucky genetics. The truth of it is my nervous system is irregular and reactive to all types of stimuli, which makes me very sensitive and very intolerant of bullshit systems. I am here to question, to push, and imagine a different way to live. I’ll be very gen-z for a moment and quote one of my favorite youtubers, Hank Green. “I work to make the world a little more me shaped while I work to make myself a little more world shaped”. Thank You, my wave III cohort, Alexa Rose Foundation, and The Common Well, for helping shape this part of my world alongside me. 

Thank you for joining me in this moment,

Video of the talk coming YouTube soon. Follow along here → https://www.youtube.com/@Kamryn_Rose