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Peek-A-Boo / how do you make your toast?

Ritu Arya

Sculptural Installation, 2024
Clay, Glaze, Acrylic, Wood

A constant gloom that looms, dark or bright. My eternal companion. I come home to it reach night. I enjoy it. Mostly. In love with this longing, I am afraid of getting too close. When will they leave? How long will they stay this time? Insides hurt. Hands shake. I twitch. I am sure I saw a shadow move in the corner. Is it breathing down my neck? Maybe it is merely my guilt. Or perhaps I am losing my mind.

Lately, it’s flicking my middle fingers constantly. Oh, and I have not stopped placing my wrists on the hot pan where the toast is getting crispy – crispier than I like.

I enjoyed looking in the mirror. I don’t anymore. Am I afraid of being seen for what I am? What am I? Deprived? Paranoid? Scared? Broken? Who am I? There is a hole inside. Or is it us, we are all inside a hole? The shaking body when the fingers slowly reach out for where there once was a gap. Now it’s just flesh. Spread around like thick curtain walls. Black. Just black. Nothingness. Falling endlessly through a free space, heart in your mouth. It’s on a loop.

Monsters under beds are real. Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t. Some unlucky souls even know their names. Is someone going to be hurt? Am I enough? I recount the parts I can feel, just as I recount things in my handbag. My knotted guts, my twitching arm and the poor caged heart. Oh, the relentless hyperventilating heart.

Hiding. Learning to be kinder to myself. Loathing the person I was. The person I am. Jumpy. Tired. Grinning. Although, never winning. Am I playing peek-a-boo with myself, trying to run away from me? Am I? Who am I? Whisperings from the other side, what am I? I can tell, you know. I see what you have been through, what you go through. And I wonder how you make your toast and if you play this wretched game, too.

About the Installation

These hand-sculpted, life-sized ‘inside-like’ bodily shapes, carrying hints of anatomy, portray the internal and sensory, explicitly representing what the body and mind of a person crippled with aftermaths of trauma can feel like.

As you move around the platforms, you will catch glimpses of those around you – either through the gaps and spaces in some of the sculptures or the two-way mirror.

This Peek-A-Boo intends to become a prompt in further breaking the stigma that we build for ourselves and others when it comes to mental health as a result of the fear of being judged or perceived in a negative light, which results in alienation. It makes a space to connect, pause and think of the complex consequences and the physical, psychological and emotional impact of trauma resulting from [including, but not limited to] childhood abuse, sexual assault and emotional neglect. It is a stimulus to try to fathom the severe outcomes of the adverse societal shame that keeps us from speaking about such sufferings and agony.

The two-way mirror is a participatory component of this installation that encourages observers to reveal their own invisible wounds and, consequently, aid others in doing the same.

The work has a straightforward aim of voicing that, when it comes to traumatic experiences and mental health disorders, acknowledgment and acceptance are two of the essentials that most of us are denied but which, conceivably, are what we need most – to be seen and to become visible.

About the Artist

Ritu Arya [b.1991] is a multidisciplinary artist from India, currently based in Glasgow. Her work revolves around sorrow, melancholia, longing and similar sentiments, with a constant emphasis on the sufferings that untended trauma creates. In the last few years, she has exhibited her work in Cologne, Moscow, Glasgow and Dundee [UK] and was awarded the RSS Gilbert Bayes Grant in 2023.