Artist Statement – Cam Whelr
In creating this digital collage, I endeavor to render my poem “Body Surfing” as an urgent, sensorial, and impressionistic plunge into my embodied realities. My poem employs syntactical strange-ing (comingling disjunctive plural and singular noun-verb forms) to reveal multiple points of view coinhabiting my singular body while also referencing the wide community of invisibly dis/Abled folk. I underpin original text layers with open-sourced visual elements and audio fragments curated and forged to reveal their particular impacts on my specific nervous system. In aggregate, these elucidate my changing corporeal milieux of ease, triggering, fragmentation, departure and eventual return.
Cam Whelr MD is a dis/Abled pediatrician, poet, writer and visual artist whose words appear in Pleiades, The Rumpus, and Collaborature, among other journals and anthologies. She is a Best of The Net & Pushcart nominee whose works explore trauma-forged and chronically ill embodiment. She forages a well-rooted and nourished creative life as a practicing A[r]tivist for
The Res[t]istance from mid-Missouri where two affable service dogs allow her to share their home. She can be found as @CamWhelr on IG, FB, BSky, and at Substack: Lucent Splinter.
IceFloe Press 