IIn each of us, there is a hidden landscape containing the parts of ourselves abandoned in order to survive. This work contains images of bipolar disorder, but is not only about mental illness.

In 2006, I bought a large, blue suitcase to take back to England with me where I had started grad school a year earlier. I used the suitcase to move the rest of my belongings from the US.  Since then, it has accompanied me back and forth several times between England, Mexico, Iceland, Lebanon and Chicago.  In 2016, I packed it once more and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina.  By then, it was barely a suitcase.

During the first phase of this series (“Fleshmap: My Embroidered Bipolar Geographies, 2019”), I used thread to circumnavigate the geography of memory.  In 16 different panels, I mapped a life frequently interrupted by Bipolar Disorder. In “Fleshmap: My Unravelling Geographies”, I revisited the previous maps, trying to reshape them from personal narratives into visceral objects of memory. I also continued with this system by filling in time gaps between the years of 1985 and 2010 and then, finally, mapping 2016-2018 in Raleigh.  

I located that place that holds the pieces of me I have recently abandoned  in order to live. This place I’ve mapped contains some brutal memories from which I’ve tried to excavate myself. It also contains much of what I loved in ways too dangerous to control: the power of mania, men who loved a version of me that was not always me, directing theatre, the use of my body in ways that were electrifying but always unsustainable.  I’ve spent the past four years cutting pieces from me. Eventually, they drifted to that place and landed like ash.  I am the skeleton of a suitcase searching for a new use.

—Jennifer Markowitz, 2021