Eden Schwinghamer

Please Note: The following contains graphic depictions of violence, in direct reference to suicide and mental illness. If you're struggling, there is help. Please call 1-833-456-4566 in Canada, or 911 if you are experiencing an emergency.

At 14 years old, I asked to be driven to the hospital. I was at the very tail end of a string of increasingly desperate attempts on my life, and was exhausted. I was tired of ripping myself apart, and I wanted to heal. This process, the one of unwinding the thing inside my chest, resulted in the total unravelling of myself, leaving me a husk of who I had been. In this state, I was guided in intensive therapies to grow anew.

Be No Evil focuses on this era of my life, documenting the pain associated with it. By rendering those wounds physically and projecting them outwards onto my skin, I render myself visible in a moment of profound pain, change, and reinvention. Beginning bruised and finishing with a still-open wound, I transform from a person afflicted by their circumstances into one changed by them. Channelling the mythology of Chiron in the final images, I imagine myself as the wounded healer, blessed with the ability to heal and communicate but burdened with the persistent healing of self.