Art & Parkinson’s
The Body Broken & Whole
Parkinson’s Mask
I had been working on a series of images about the idea of the Parkinson’s mask, the stiffening of the muscles in people with Parkinson’s that makes the face look frozen.
One Sunday morning I was trying to read an article in the paper when Hal asked me to listen to some wordplay he’s been working on. He started getting tangled up in his words and it was taking a while.
I listened and laughed at his wordplay and then said a bit impatiently that I was going off-line to read my article. He laughed and said that he was sure there’s a planet out there somewhere that would have him as king (given his quirky propensity for wordplay).
That led to us riffing about what kind of planet each of us would want to be king or queen of. And we wondered what planet we were exiled from and why. It was bittersweet, realizing that that’s pretty much what our lives feel like.
So these images turned out to be not just about the Parkinson’s mask, but maybe also about about how Hal, the exiled king, might feel inside the mask.
Dropping Things
My husband drops things. Little things mostly. Crumbs from his muffin. A fork. A magazine. Sometimes the dropped items are so small that there is no sound. But the larger things make noises: thuds, clicks, bangs. Although I’ve learned to tune out the lesser disturbances, I’m still always on edge, waiting for the bigger ones, the times when he drops his whole body.