Playing Dead
Severe traumatic events can elicit all sorts of psychological coping mechanisms, one of which is dissociation. Dissociation leaves individuals teetering on the edge of sanity in the name of self preservation and allows the mind to temporarily "disconnect" from overwhelming emotions and experiences to best increase the chances of getting out alive.
97% of women aged between 18 and 24 in the UK have experienced sexual harassment or assault.
In 'Playing Dead' Maisie Avis invites the viewer to be immersed into a hyper-saturated paracosm. This project explores the unseen spaces which appear in moments of dissociation, the artists fantasy world allow them to escape reality and navigate traumatic events through vibrant detailed imagery.
Playing Dead has taken something that made me feel unsafe in my own body, something that haunted me, isolated me and made me not want to exist anymore and turned it into my very reason to get out of bed.
The world I have created through my imagery, is a place I wish didn’t have to exist but one I am grateful for, a place I have been more than I want to admit, but in the strangest way it is my safe place.