With Teethe is an ongoing personal project exploring trauma, healing, and the body’s language—through the metaphor and material of teeth. After a traumatic brain injury in 2021, my body began speaking in new, visceral ways. Teeth became both symptom and symbol—my signal that my brain had reached its limit.

 

Following the accident, I sustained facial fractures and developed trigeminal neuralgia, an excruciating nerve condition. For over two years, I had no pain relief. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and biting into fabric became a primal form of comfort. Even now, the act of biting grounds me.

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My teeth are now a warning system. When I’m overstimulated, they clench or chatter—signaling that I’ve gone too far. Before the injury, like many women, I was taught to override discomfort, pushing through unsafe and unsustainable conditions. The injury forced a reckoning—a rupture I call ego death—and a shift toward embodied honesty.

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With Teethe documents this transformation through creative practice. Teeth serve as both medium and metaphor—marking pain, boundaries, and survival. The project also speaks to the realities of invisible disabilities and chronic illness, proposing new visual languages to express what often goes unseen or unspoken.