The TV is always on, always something else to look at. There’s always alcohol in the cupboard, something else to feel. Everyone smokes, something else to do. We laugh at our pain until it stops being real. It’s nice, it’s comforting, until it’s all you do. Modes of comfort stop being comforting when they’re used to brush off and ignore real issues. I have used cups of tea, sewing materials and cloth to represent these modes of comfort. The sewing materials reference my mother’s side, most of us know how to sew, with both my mother and grandmother being seamstresses. While sewing can be used to mend, with soft fabrics and thread to pull things together, it can be used to cover up. Sewing over something so you don’t have to look at it, pricking your finger on a needle, pulling the thread too tight, suffocating under the fabric. And so, the use of sewing tools represents something that can mend, hurting. A cup of tea made for you when you’re not feeling good can be nice, it’s warm, it feels good. But when that’s all you get, when the tea is meant to solve everything, it doesn’t taste so good. It starts to feel like drinking it is meant to shut you up. With these symbols of comfort, I am trying to make them appear unappealing, painful or overwhelming. When you ignore issues or belittle them for too long, they overflow, they hurt, they rot. Ultimately all this pushing down leaves you with a murky, lost feeling. Bad memories are confusing because no one wants to confirm that there was something wrong.