Pissed Fall Over (PFO)

A couple of months ago, in the middle of the night, I woke up with a crippling neck spasm that was so debilitating it left me moving through the world like an anglepoise lamp. In desperation, I made my way, wonkily, to an osteopath who asked, before anything else, if I’d ever had any serious injuries.

I said no. Not for a very long time.

He seemed unconvinced. And as I breezily mentioned that I’d fallen out of a window fifteen years ago, he explained that what I was experiencing was most likely stored trauma from the fall; the broken collarbone, the impact, and everything else I’d chosen not to deal with at the time. The body keeps the score, as they say.

It seemed like too long ago; I was doubtful. But there was something about the dull pain that lingered long after the worst of the spasm had eased, a familiar echo that reminded me of the pain I had lived with for months after the accident. And suddenly, it made an uncomfortable kind of sense.

That conversation opened a door back into a period of my life where injury was commonplace, brushed off, even joked about.

I referred to them as PFOs - my Pissed Fall Overs - and the tripping over kerbs and falling down steps while rolling home from nights out back then seemed almost inevitable. I had a certain optimism about my own durability.

The memory of Meryl in Death Becomes Her helped me through !

Following my gold-medal-winning PFO (the one where I fell out of a window while travelling alone in Bali and survived), I somehow got on a flight, seriously injured, determined that no one should notice. I was simply focused on getting to the other side, where I’d go straight to hospital. Despite being frighteningly weak, and genuinely concerned I might croak it mid-air, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her came to mind like a mirage of black, camp humour, which somehow helped me through.

The whole tale is worthy of its own novella, though I usually keep it locked away in the trauma storage unit of my mind. Occasionally, when I pay it any attention, like now, I notice a complicated mixture of horror and shame at the lack of care I had for myself. But Meryl always comes back to me. Her madly smiling face, head twisted completely back to front. The performance of being fine, still looking pretty good. The insistence on cracking on regardless, no matter the damage. That logic feels familiar.

As an artist, I realise I’ve long been interested in bodies caught at the literal and metaphorical tipping point. I used to put my models on trampolines to photograph and draw them falling through space - limbs loose, gravity imminent. Falling was a big subject for me, undoubtedly a way of working through my own catastrophic PFO. That work came from looking, though, not from inhabiting. The body was something to depict rather than something to think from.

The recent trip to the osteo got me circling this territory again, and this week I’ve been making a suite of new drawings that revisit the PFOs of yesteryear. Not as scenes or stories, but as sensations. They come from an embodied memory rather than a visual one. They hold the body as something slightly unreliable, occasionally spectacular, often vulnerable. Fractured and reassembled. I’m becoming more and more obsessed with how the body carries history, how it adapts, how it absorbs what the mind shrugs off.

A catalogue of terrible decisions led me to flying at 35,000 feet with a ruptured spleen and a fractured everything back in 2011, painfully chuckling to myself that me and Meryl were one and the same. There is humour in the telling and thinking of that, though it was also truly horrible. In the same way, drawing has that multiplicity about it.

I love that life can be comic and tragic and idiotic and thrilling and boring and heartbreaking, all at once, and that drawing has the capacity to hold that simultaneity without needing to resolve it.

The act of making, the drawn line itself, becomes the thing that holds it all together: emotion, personal history, and the truth of something that’s felt but not fully known.

I’ve got a big birthday coming up next month. Optimistically, I’m hoping there’s a charcoal line somewhere to hold me upright.

Pray for me ;)

Patsy XO

Pissed Fall Over I, one of a suite of new drawings made from memory