Scribbles on Healing Clothing Designs

Body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs) are a set of behaviours involving repetitive and uncontrollable picking, pulling, biting or scratching one's body. They are some of the least well understood complex mental health disorders. BFRBs are related to obsessive compulsive disorder, and body dysmorphic disorder, and affect around 4 million people in the UK, although roughly only 50% of those affected tend to seek medical support. I have my own BFRBs, although I did not recognise them as such for a long time. Once I understood them better, I started to look for ways to develop a positive relationship with my BRFBs through art. Clothing has always been something I have enjoyed, and choice of clothing became increasingly important due to my BFRBs. Naturally, this led to my desire to combine my artistic processing of these behaviours with clothes, resulting in a series of designs that I have titled Scribbles on Healing. Scribbles on Healing explores the process of picking, pulling and scratching through detailed pen and ink drawings of natural materials that have gone through their own process of excoriation, like a twig stripped of its bark, or bones stripped of their flesh. The intense focus required to make such drawings supports my own BFRB recovery, while the subject matter acts as an expression of the experience of having a BFRB.