April 2024

Imagine, you’re trying to pay attention to a conversation, but your eyes won’t stop rolling… or your at work, trying to speak with your customers, but you can’t get a single word out because your jaw decided it didn’t want to open… imagine you’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when suddenly both your leg AND your head start shaking like a dog’s at the same time… now imagine going through this for hours on end… THAT is what it’s like to have Tourette’s Syndrome Disorder. The consistent act of repetitive movements that can result in utter chaos.

Hello, my name is Andrea Hoagland and I am the creator behind the bottle pieces behind, beside, and before me. I first want to thank you all for coming to my presentation, with a special thanks to my professors and classmates, my friends and church sisters, my coworkers and customers, and my family, for all the encouragement I’ve received throughout this whole process. I love you all, and I am truly blessed to have you all in my life… thank you. And now, I will explain to you my collection and how it came to be.

Using repetitive images, recycled materials, and the very specific color pallet of black, white, and teal, the color chosen for the Tourette’s Syndrome Disorder Awareness ribbon, I create symbolic, sculptural pieces to explain these extreme explosive reactions brought on by my brain, called tics… these tic attacks can be both painful and embarrassing and can last anywhere between seconds to minutes to hours to days. They can be singular or come on as a group. There is no controlling them. When I try to, it’s equivalent to gluing a mento into a coke bottle, shaking it up, and quickly trying to duct tape it shut… it’s explosive and twice as painful as it would have been had I have not tried to repress it.

Using this metaphor, I construct “Repression”, a sculptural representation of what it’s like when I try to contain a Tourertte’s tic. To show this, I employ 2L soda bottles and insulation foam to represent the explosive and messy results of trying to repress an attack. Placing rods into the mouth of the bottles, I then spray both foam and paint, into the mouths, along the foundation and all along the rods, before using a wooden skewer to drag it up and down to thin it along the rod until it looks like there is just a slight glue looking layer on both the rod and the bottle. By doing this, just as I have learned to allow my body the freedom to express itself freely to reduce pain, I also allow the foam control of just how this mess will appear once it grows and reveals itself. Only then do I know what it has become.

As stiff as it becomes, however, it is of no help to support the overall piece nor is it helpful supporting the top layers, such as with my piece “TSD & Me”, where the weight of the head’s tics are so heavy, it has caused the main body to lean and warp slowly over time, to the point I had to add an additional support just to make sure it didn’t snap. This sculpture was actually originally going to just be a white head on a cardboard tube, but after researching other artist for ideas on to how to make it stand, I came across a professional artist who shares the same name, and sort of the same idea as me… Andrea Patrie makes abstract paintings and sculptures that she says “relates issues of identity and ambiguity to moments of calm and organic chaos”. Her one piece that REALLY caught my eye is called “Mother Mold”, a mixed media sculpture that depicts a stick thin female form that successfully stands on its own. After seeing this sculpture, I became inspired to continue adding onto “TSD & Me” by incorporating, first metal arms, and then including a foreign hat, soccer ball eyes, locked and taped lips, soda can tabs, a frog in the throat, a rattle hand, and broken pencil fingers with eraser shavings. Added together, each teal feature shows just nine of my most reoccurring tics.

The desk in my wall piece “Location” is also painted teal to show that these intrusive and invasive attacks have no care about what I’m doing at the time… I could be working, driving, resting, or even sleeping, but they still come at random and unannounced.

In my piece “Combined Attack!”, wanting to expand even more of my use of both insulation foam AND paint, I began researching other artists who may have used these unexpected mediums as well… until I came across Dan Lam. A female Texan immigrate from the Philippines, specializing in creating abstract sculptures using painted Expandable Foam. Inspired by both nature and the human body, her pieces usually take on the forms of dripping blobs frozen in time. This inspired me to include the black paint drips draining from the flaps and the boxes themselves.

Another way I can relate to this piece is in its fragility. You see, I wanted to make the boxes appearances deceiving and unrecognizable, for people to question what they are and what they’re made from. For people to see it and think it’s a strong and heavy foundation, but then to realize it’s light enough for a child to lift it. For this, I glued three bottles on the five boxes, and it seemed to be holding strong and sturdy with the two lower bottles on the flaps of two different boxes, holding up the bottle shooting into the sky. However, over time, the bottle on one of the flaps fell, causing the whole structure to nearly break. To fix this, I changed their foundations by placing that specific bottle inside one of the boxes, adding foam below the other bottle’s flap, then added two more bottles on the outer-side of the structure, for better stability. This relates to the fact that… no, not everyone can tell when I have an attack, in fact, I’ve had people tell me “I couldn’t tell at all” or “you hide it very well” I’ve even heard “you have great control over it”, … but the truth is, I DON’T have any control over it… I’ve just learned how to ignore and even mock the vulnerability and embarrassment it brings on, occasionally changing my own location to wait it out when I feel like I may mentally collapse. Of all my pieces, even more than “TSD & Me”, “Combined Attack!” gave me the most sense of self-reflection during its creation.

And finally, in my piece “Speechless”, I include more exploding bottles, specifically four smaller ones, whose explosions both surround and add up to the four different reactions to the mouths. These obstructions, as well as the surrounding chaos, show just how distracting and hindering these attacks can be.

If you would have told me five to six years ago that I would be standing here today as a growing artist, I would have laughed in your face, because back then, I thought that my Tourette’s wouldn’t even allow me to hold a pen without shaking, let alone a paintbrush. But now… I have turned this “incapability” into my strength, using this series, which I’m calling “TSD & Me”, to show you, the audience, as well as myself that, while I may experience these on a daily basis… they do not control me. I CAN reach my goals and I WILL make a difference through what I love most… creating art.

And this is only the beginning…

someday, I plan to have my own research team, so that I can research more exceptionalities, and bring to light what people with them live through on a daily basis…

Someday, I plan to have my own artist team, so that we can cover as many disabilities as we possibly can…

and someday, I’ll have my own museum, so that anyone can come and experience these pieces in a safe, non-judgemental place.

Andrea Hoagland

April 2024