Diana Story
Diana Story grew up in an intercultural family in Naarm/Melbourne and has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom since 2019. Her practice explores rituals of meaning-making and the interplay of memory (personal, intergenerational, and collective) and how it is (re)formed over time. Informed by her experiences of chronic illness and the aftermath of sexual violence, her work navigates the externalization of internal landscapes. Everyday phenomena become sites of anchoring within the shifting terrain of memory, where meaning is continually outlined, destabilized, disavowed or reinforced.
My map of home on the bad days (a vignette from 10.04.26)
My eyes peel open to a brick on my forehead. Attempts to raise myself reveal my body to be a long-submerged sprung mattress, permeated by stagnant water. While a lifeforce wills me upwards, a ghostly body kneels before me, pushing my arms into the mattress. You will have to push me back first, it says.
A sourness wretches through me, a goopy kind of poison that swishes and swells with a fluent knowledge of my limbs. It seizes any physical strength, seeping throughout, looking, too, to leech into the porous waters of my emotional and memetic landscape, to seize control of how the narrative of today will be whittled.
With closed eyes, I imagine myself close to the tip of a mountain. This is a magic trick I use: to conjure a placebo-adrenaline, to fight the ghost and power myself up each inch of the stairs (the rocky mountain of the domestic), toward the shower. Everything is impermanent.
With another push, the ghost dissolves into the movements of blankets and I’m up, inching up the mountain to the respite of the loungeroom floor. As the rushing waters greet me, the ghost returns, forcing me down to the bath mat for a “break” before the shower can commence.
Later, as I draw the curtain aside, I imagine the Emmys before me. I clasp the body of my golden statue (and wonder, how is their health, actually?) in triumph, just before weakness and nausea set in. Before it fully submerges me, I gamble toward the couch, the safest spot, where I join a dear friend, Mr Bucket.
On bad days, I move between these points on a map I’ve drawn countless times before.
The poison sears in my gut. Anything I held in is now out in the open.
The couch hugs me and tells me I need to rest. I have learned to trust it, sometimes more than my own logic. Sleep and you’ll (maybe) feel better when you wake.
My brain argues back. My eyes flit between how I imagine them in debate: But you were so much better yesterday, how can you be like this today? Today was meant to be the day you’d work on [insert chore/dream project/errand here], and now the day is ruined.
And suddenly, voices from the long past join in: You look so strongly built, how can it be that you are so sensitive and weak?
The tender couch and acidic brain fight for a while as my skin plays host to goosebumps and my body trembles under a blanket.
A darkness befalls me.
When I wake a few hours later, it is to the flutter of a soft, winged friend. In my house-map for bad days, I try to rest on this couch because it is a spot where not only inanimate but sentient friends will greet me.
About a year ago, on a sunny afternoon, he first landed here, and we were both startled by the presence of one another. Wearing a band on his leg: a gallant, iridescent racing pigeon. I located his owner, who told me that through a wing injury he had become a bad flyer, and that he had no interest in keeping him due to this physical inadequacy. He added, ominously, that if he had to come and pick him up, he would have to consider what would become of him.
So I said, he can live here with me.
It seemed that two beasts with less-than-optimal health had somehow been drawn to each other: two beings recuperating in the throes of ailments we did not choose. His given name is Billy.
While my body refused water and ejected any ounce of it it could, Billy looked on in concern. He shuffled closer to my side of the window to keep an eye on me while I slept.
As the sun began to fall below the horizon, I could feel the poison begin to dissipate from my limbs. In the fading light, I was greeted by his silhouette in the shadows, and I thanked him for watching out for me.
On the map of navigating home on the bad days, Billy’s kinship in dysfunction acts like a glowing lamp in the labyrinth I relearn to navigate each time.
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