BREATHE IN BURN OUT (2026) - Dora Lionstone
BREATHE IN BURN OUT gathers 1,000 transformations of a single self-portrait, altered through collage, cutting, and mark-making. Presented as a hand bound artist book, the project reflects on the cumulative effects of invisible labor, trauma, and exhaustion, forming a fragmented record of identity shaped by trauma and early motherhood.
The work began one year after a traumatic birth that left me temporarily paralyzed. In the long wake of recovery and the relentless demands of caregiving,
I turned to an old self portrait, made a year before my pregnancy. Through repeated acts of intervention, I continuously altered, obscured, and reworked the same image.
Each page presents twelve transformations at a time, allowing the grid to unfold slowly and rhythmically. On the reverse, photographed and reproduced in this book, traces of the process remain: pressure marks, bleed-throughs, tape, and ink stains. These backsides act as a secondary body, registering the residue of strain, repetition, and collapse. Together they form a visual language of burnout, bearing the imprints and scars left by trauma and sustained exhaustion.
As the viewer turns each page, they enter a rhythm of repetition and rupture, effort and exhaustion, disappearance and persistence. BREATHE IN BURN OUT resists linear narrative, unfolding instead as a layered meditation on a self undone and reassembled, again and again, within the quiet folds of care, collapse, and the uncertain, ongoing work of becoming, both artist and mother.
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Second handmade edition of 25 copies, signed and numbered.
Each book has been bound by hand.
Open spine with cutout grid on front + back with portrait inlay
Including a handwritten text on transparent paper.
| Size: | 20,2 x 29,3 cm |
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| Edition: | 10 |
| Binding: | Coptic binding |
| Printing: | Inkjet printing, Laser print |
| Place: | Amsterdam, NL |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Publisher: | SPROUT PUBLISH |