August 2025
Burnout explores stuckness not as failure but as a site of embodied knowledge. Working with timber through carving and burning, this autoethnographic project investigates how the autonomic nervous system shapes creative practice - how threat responses manifest as creative blocks, how risk assessment operates at a somatic level.
The undulating carved surfaces emerge from sustained engagement with material resistance, each rhythm negotiated between tool, grain, and hand. The burning process transforms surface into archive: gradients from raw wood to charred black map states of depletion and recovery, making visible the often-invisible emotional labor of making. This is practice-based research that treats the body's defensive responses - traditionally pathologized as 'burnout' or 'creative block' - as data, as methodology, as generative constraint
