Breathing Under Water
Breathing Under Water is a body of work built around systems of surrender, resistance, retreat, and signal—states that move through the body as we navigate grief, trauma, recovery, and the slow, laborious practice of living through them. Working with fiber, crochet, and the visual language of flags, I construct objects that attempt to carry meaning without relying on spoken language—forms that signal, hold, and transmit experience before it is named.
The work draws from multiple systems of communication: white flags of surrender, black flags of resistance, a blue field of retreat, and the structured language of maritime signal flags. These systems are reworked through hand and material—cotton yarn, repetitive stitching, and the accumulation of small, deliberate actions. Each piece is built through a process that mirrors the conditions it reflects: slow, attentive, and often inefficient, like cutting grass one blade at a time with a pair of scissors. The labor is not separate from the meaning—it is the meaning.
In a culture where naming is often what allows something to exist, this work asks what happens before language, or outside of it. What does it mean to feel something fully without resolving it? To signal distress, hope, or waywardness without explanation? To allow grief, endurance, or care to stand on their own, without translation?
The flags function as both objects and propositions. They draw on traditions of communication used at sea—systems designed to convey urgency across distance—while also holding more intimate, internal states. They are signals that may not be fully understood, but are nonetheless felt. They ask the viewer to enter into a space of attention, where meaning is not delivered, but encountered.
This work is also a return to the body. After years of working in community-based and site-responsive practices, Breathing Under Water marks a re-entry into fully embodied performance and making. The systems I have developed—scores, signals, gestures—are not abandoned, but re-inhabited. The body becomes both the site of transmission and the receiver, moving through these states not as abstractions, but as lived experience.
Underlying the work is a set of simple, persistent truths:
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it. (Richard Rhor)
Enlightenment, like recovery, is a practice. Not a destination. The work continues in this way—step by step, stitch by stitch—moving into the unknown, placing attention back into each action, and finding, somehow, a way to take another step.
These works do not resolve. They remain in process. They ask to be met there.
Date
May 28 – August 8, 2026
Performance: “How do we move through this?“
May 31, 2026 at 4pm
Prien Lake Park, Lake Charles, LA
Flag-making Workshop
May 30, 2026 – 10am-Noon & 1-3pm
The Art Factory, Lake Charles, LA
Place
DPR Gallery
104 W Pujo Street
Lake Charles, LA
Lead Artist
Victoria Bradford Styrbicki
Contributing Artists
Lauren Moore
Photo
Jared Kelsey
