Diary of a Carer

This work emerges from a space of quiet, persistent unraveling. It is shaped by the artist’s lived experience as the sole caregiver for a close family member enduring the ruptures of severe mental illness. In the shadow of care, where visibility wanes, Chitan began to map her own disintegration—not in words, but through image, material, and gesture.

There is a silence that surrounds the figure of the carer. It is not the silence of peace, but of erasure. Anxiety, emotional fatigue, depressive inertia—these are the unspoken textures that formed the undercurrent of her daily life. Diary of a Carer is not a linear testimony, but a porous, visual lament. Here, the natural world becomes proxy, not for escape, but for embodiment. Landscape becomes mirror. Bark becomes breath. The printed image, too, is reimagined as terrain—something that can be broken, sewn, interfered with. A surface to be entered, ruptured, or perhaps healed.

In this process, Chitan found herself drawn to materials that hold both memory and meaning. She turned to textile, specifically felt—what Deleuze and Guattari once described as an “anti-fabric.” Protective. Absorptive. Mute. Felt became a metaphor for muffled presence; for what it means to be unheard in the context of caregiving, where crisis centres the patient, and the carer disappears behind the veil of responsibility.

Thread followed. The needle offered not precision but tenderness. Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, Chitan engaged with stitch not to repair, but to register rupture. Mouths sewn closed. Eyes encircled in red. Each thread a line of tension. An articulation of the unspeakable. A quiet scream stitched into being.

Diary of a Carer does not seek to universalise or resolve. It exists within the intimate geography of personal grief and ongoing resilience. It is a work that asks not for sympathy, but for space—to acknowledge the invisible labour of care, the weight of witnessing, and the fragile, flickering self that endures beneath it all.