lydia.pettit@gmail.com

LYDIA PETTIT (b. 1991) is an artist from Baltimore, USA living and working in London, UK. Pettit’s works explore the experience of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the politics of the body, using self portraiture as a vehicle to process and communicate. The body is a host to trauma, and becomes a battleground in itself in the push and pull between recovery and regression, love and disgust, tenderness and callousness. To live with PTSD is to be a haunted house; spectres of the past infiltrate the halls… Who's there? Turn the corner and suddenly, a flash of fear, pain, creeping dread and shame. The Artist uses direct references from horror as avatars for different parts of the psyche - Anger as a crazed slasher, Fear as the helpless victim, and Desire as a rabid wild woman. Putting on these personas through self portraiture speaks to the dark comedy of living with mental illness, the ups and the downs, and the complications of recovery. Her works are confrontational depictions of her own inward gaze, forcing the viewer to reckon with the realities of her body and mind, and their own viewpoints on the struggles women face with sexual abuse, trauma, body politics, and mental health.