STRESS FLESH

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Stress Flesh is an interdisciplinary collaboration between an artist and a psychologist to study stress. We started working on this project when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. At some point everybody around the world shared extreme stress. This collaboration came naturally since we both were graduate students who were extremely stressed during the pandemic, and we wanted to explore the idea of human interaction in our current environment. We recruited participants from the Lubbock community and recorded their stress levels, then we created sculptures that represent each person’s unique stress experience.

 This interactive exhibit is meant to invite our community to take more control of their stress management processes by directly handling and leaving whatever stress they have in these sculptures. When we are stressed, the ways we deal with stress can affect other people. Stress Flesh takes that process and makes it visible because each time someone squeezes and presses against the sculptures, they will leave their own residue against them. As more people press their stress into the sculptures, the pieces will become more marked by the influence of others. We do this to other people psychologically every day, but the results are invisible to the human eye. Stress Flesh makes this invisible psychological process visible through a physical metaphor and invites the audience to be more mindful of each other.