Paracosm
Sara Jewell
2016

Paracosm is a segmented graphic memoir about mental health, autoimmune disease, memory, and idealization. This portion of the project entitled In Vino Veritas explores dichotomy and duality as it relates to first love, substance abuse, and nostalgia. Paracosm is as preoccupied with memory and nostalgia as any memoir. In her own textual memoir Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch ruminates on the transposition of something as fragile as memory into words; “According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience… However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts” (277-78). In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie writes that, “Every time autobiographical comics artists draw themselves and those around them, they cannot avoid engaging with the sociocultural models that underpin body image, including categories of sex, gender, health, and beauty. Pictorial embodiment is thus always a profoundly social and political activity” (73). In the construction of the visual and textual self in tangible form upon the page, the graphic memoirist grapples with assimilated social and cultural representations of identity in the context of her own experience.

To see and support more of Sara Jewell’s work, you can subscribe to her on Patreon here.

A multiroom projection event, showcasing the entirety of Paracosm will occur in ASH (Adele Simmons Hall) on May 5th and 6th, 2016, from 5-8pm. A reception with hors d’oeuvres and libations will be held on the 5th in the lobby, with projections in rooms 111, 112, 221, and 222.