This series of photographs explores the traces of pain on the body. It began with a series of photographs I made of a friend who had undergone a mastectomy.
I became interested not only in pain itself, but in everything that surrounds it: the experience of bodily transformation, the feeling of deformity, the clinical experience, fear, vulnerability, and the presence of death.
I am interested in the way scars become part of our intimate lives, and in how we relate to these marks, physical traces of experiences that belong to the past. The body becomes a kind of archive, carrying its own ruins and remnants of what has happened to us.
Scars are not simply evidence of wounds. They are traces of memory, holding stories that may remain long after the pain itself has faded.
Through these images, I explore the relationship between the body, memory, and time, and the ways in which we carry the remains of our past with us.
Patricia Abarca de la Fuente 