Research Paper.
Art As An Alternative Language For Pain.
Research Question
This paper argues that the experience of chronic pain, often described as unspeakable, can find articulation through visual and metaphorical forms. By situating art as an alternative language, and examining metaphors of landscape, tree, and spine, the paper demonstrates how contemporary practice can reframe pain as both embodied and ecological, restoring agency and a sense of belonging to the sufferer.
Abstract
The experience of chronic pain is often described as unspeakable, rendering the sufferer unable to communicate their condition through conventional language. Visual and metaphorical forms, however, can restore a sense of agency and make its weight more perceptible. This paper situates that enquiry within landscapes and ecological metaphors of the body. It considers how art operates as an alternative language when spoken or written discourse falters, opening modes of expression that exceed traditional modes of communication. Through this lens, the analysis turns to the symbolic role of landscapes and trees, examining how arboreal metaphors articulate both endurance and vulnerability.
Through close readings of the work of Giuseppe Penone and brothers Paul and Jason Skellett, the paper explores how visual practice reclaims agency from the isolating effects of pain. By situating the body within ecological and metaphorical frameworks, it proposes that art generates an emotional geography where pain, memory, and belonging can coexist.
Keywords
Chronic pain; Belonging; Identity; Arboreal metaphor; Embodied memory
Main Body
Introduction
There is a weight and a quiet heaviness that certain landscapes seem to carry, an energy running beneath the surface and in the air around you. It is not always visible but can be felt in the body. These are the kinds of places I return to, whether through solitary walks, shared hikes, or memory. They linger between the nostalgic and the ethereal, shaping how one understands belonging. This paper begins with that felt sense: the difficulty of giving form to experiences that resist articulation.
There are many experiences we undergo where language, whether spoken or written, falls short. Words often fail to capture the full spectrum of emotion or sensation that accompanies heightened states. Nowhere is this inadequacy more transparent than in the experience of pain, particularly chronic pain. As Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain, the very nature of pain resists verbal objectification (Scarry, 1985). Attempts to convey pain through language collapse into repetition or vagueness, leaving the sufferer with little means of expression. Virginia Woolf makes a similar observation in On Being Ill: while there are countless words for love, joy, or pleasure, “language at once runs dry” when it turns towards physical pain (Woolf, 1930, p. 3).
This silence creates a need for other forms of expression. If words falter, art offers another route. Through visual and material forms, it reimagines communication where language cannot reach, creating shared terrains of meaning that allow recognition and belonging, particularly for those whose experiences of pain are excluded from common discourse.
When turning to the landscape, arboreal forms such as altered trees and snags carry a symbolic weight that aligns closely with chronic pain. A snag, the skeletal remnant of a once-living tree, is both a mark of loss and a site of endurance. Its body testifies to what has been endured, standing as evidence of damage while simultaneously sustaining new life through mosses, fungi, insects, and birds. This duality of fragility and persistence offers a striking metaphor for pain: an ongoing state that reshapes the body yet does not erase existence. Trees bear witness to time in ways that parallel the human body, as outlined in Sue Black’s Written in Bone. Their scars and twisted limbs form a visible archive of survival, revealing histories of storm, disease, or drought. Arboreal imagery, in this sense, creates a language beyond words, one capable of reflecting pain’s complexity while suggesting belonging, as these altered forms remain part of their environment, rooted and recognised within the wider ecology.
Writers such as Amanda Thomson, Nan Shepherd, and Yi-Fu Tuan provide a vocabulary for what begins as a feeling difficult to articulate: topophilia, cianalas, the emotional charge of landscape. Their work does not merely describe place; it honours its complexity and the ties we form with the environments we move through. This emotional geography, how places become etched with memory, feeling, and shared identity, sits at the heart of my research question.
This paper follows that thread: of emotional geography, of memory held in place and in the body, by exploring parallels between the spine and arboreal forms, particularly snags and altered trees. Through the work of artists such as Giuseppe Penone and brothers Paul and Jason Skellett, I explore how visual practice can speak to the complexities of embodied experience, endurance, and belonging. These ideas are framed through theories of place attachment, feminist medical history, and spinal catastrophism. The aim is not to resolve these ideas but to hold them in relation, recognising that art’s strength lies not in resolution but in its ability to connect metaphor, memory, and material.
Pain and the Limits of Language
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes pain as inherently “objectless”, without an external reference point that can be fixed in language. At times, its intensity can be so overwhelming that it destroys the capacity for speech, reducing the sufferer to pre-linguistic cries not unlike those of a newborn before language is learned. This objectless quality prevents pain from being fully represented in words, creating a sense of isolation. The vocabulary that exists tends to collapse into repetition or into metaphors of violence - stabbing, burning, pulsing, aching. Each borrows from imagined external causes rather than conveying the sensation itself. Virginia Woolf observes in On Being Ill that “language at once runs dry” when directed towards physical pain (Woolf, 1930, p. 3).
This absence of language is compounded by a cultural mistrust of subjective experience. Across history, clinical authority has often privileged tests and imaging over personal accounts. Elinor Cleghorn, in Unwell Women, traces how this bias has led to misdiagnosis and disbelief, particularly for women. She recalls how symptoms now recognised as menopausal were once seen as signs of witchcraft. (Cleghorn, 2021) Gina Rippon extends this critique in The Lost Girls of Autism, showing how diagnostic frameworks built around the “male brain” excluded women entirely. In some of Hans Asperger’s case studies, boys were celebrated as “gifted” while girls with similar traits were dismissed or pathologised. (Rippon, 2025) Such histories reveal that the inadequacy of language around pain is not purely linguistic but also social and political, where entire groups have been silenced or erased.
Contemporary narratives reveal a similar pattern. Neurodiverse women and girls, historically overlooked in diagnostic systems, appear at higher risk of developing chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, conditions often accompanied by chronic fatigue and pain. While further research is needed, early studies suggest that the lack of language and research around female neurodiversity, leading to missed or delayed diagnoses, may heighten vulnerability to chronic illness (Martin, Taylor and Kelly, 2023). In this sense, the silencing of language leaves traces not only in history but in the body itself.
Yet if pain strips away language, it also pushes towards other modes of expression - gesture, sound, and image. Within clinical and therapeutic contexts, this is evident in practices such as art therapy and forest bathing, both of which emphasise embodied experience over verbal articulation.
Forest bathing, or Shinrin-yoku, developed in Japan, involves immersing oneself in a forest environment through the senses. Rather than relying on words, it engages sight, touch, scent, and sound as ways of connecting. Research has shown its physiological benefits, but what matters here is its focus on embodied awareness: a felt conversation between body and environment (Li, 2022).
Similarly, art therapy provides a non-verbal language for those living with chronic pain. By allowing sensations to be externalised through material form, it enables communication where words falter (Harasymchuk et al., 2024). The act of making offers both a distraction from pain and a reclaiming of agency, countering the isolation Scarry describes.
These practices suggest that when language collapses, expression does not end. Instead, it shifts into alternative modes rooted in the body and the senses. This foreshadows the wider potential of art, where visual and material practices create shared languages of recognition for experiences that resist speech.
Art as an Alternative Language
Untitled sculpture (Skellett and Skellett, n.d.)
As Scarry highlights in The Body in Pain, agency is stripped away from the person experiencing pain and the torment that accompanies it; instead, agency is given, particularly in the English language, to the act or object inflicting the pain. Once deprived of agency, a person experiences an equal or greater loss: the loss of language, of the ability to communicate, connect, or reach out to those around them. They are thrown into isolation, something akin to being dropped in a barren, storm-ravaged landscape with only the clothes on their back, expected to survive and find a way through without any tools to do so. All that sufferers are left with is deafening silence or overused metaphors of violence. This collapse creates an urgent need for another mode of communication. One that can act as a bridge to the sufferer, allowing them to reconnect both with their community and with their core self, the version of them in which pain is not central to their identity.
Art has the opportunity to be a response to this absence of communication. It can act as a medium that does not merely illustrate pain but creates a new language for it. Sculptors and brothers Jason and Paul Skellett both live with fibromyalgia, a condition the NHS describes as “a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body” (NHS, 2025). Two years ago, they turned to clay sculpting as an avenue of escape from what Paul described to the BBC in January 2025 as “a cross between having the flu and pulled muscles, but with extreme tiredness tied to it” (Noble & Twigge, 2025). Since they began sculpting together, they have found that their days no longer drag and that they now take half the amount of painkillers as before. Sculpting has become more than a creative pursuit; it is medicine, a lifeline. Speaking to Maya Rhodes, Paul reflected that “clay gave us a way to speak when words didn’t work” (Paul, n.d.), offering a bridge out of pain, a means of connection with others experiencing the same, and of revealing the invisible. The clay itself holds an energy, as Jason noted in the same conversation: it carries memory, absorbing the feelings, pain, and movements of the sculptor. The material becomes a vessel that both holds and transforms pain into something tangible, capable of bridging the divide (Jason, n.d.).
The example of the Skellett brothers shows that art can function as a shared space where experiences of pain are not only recognised by others but also mirrored back to those enduring similar forms of suffering, allowing for a moment of recognition and relief. When approached in this way, art can act as an alternative language, one that is public rather than private, and foster a shared space in which empathy, recognition, and belonging might grow. This act of translating private experience into shared form parallels the workings of collective memory, where individual recollections become part of a group’s shared understanding of experience. Similarly, it resonates with cianalas, a deep-seated sense of longing for, or belonging to, one’s homeland, often more profound than simple homesickness (MacLeod, 2023), in which personal emotion extends beyond the self to form part of a cultural and emotional landscape. Art, in this sense, embeds individual pain within wider geographies of meaning, transforming isolation into connection.
Art’s metaphorical and material capacities open new vocabularies for pain, restoring a sense of agency to those who experience it. These vocabularies often emerge through forms and environments that hold both memory and transformation. Among them, landscapes, and particularly arboreal forms, offer a way to explore how alternative languages might emerge.
Landscape and Arboreal Metaphors of Pain
Trees have long been read as symbols of endurance, rootedness, and time. Their surfaces record visible damage while their inner rings store memories of storms, droughts, or fire. This layered record invites comparison with the human body, which also carries an archive of experience, marked by both visible and invisible traces of survival. In the context of chronic pain, such metaphors gain particular resonance: like trees, bodies bear scars and fractures that shape but do not define their persistence. To consider arboreal forms as metaphors for pain is to explore how landscapes themselves provide a language that speaks where verbal communication fails.
In Written in Bone, forensic anthropologist Sue Black describes how human skeletons reveal lived histories through calcifications, fractures, and curvature (Black, 2021). She encourages a mode of reading that combines precision with empathy, asking us to see bones not as detached artefacts but as evidence of experience. The trunk of a tree can be read in a similar way: its rings a forensic record of trauma and recovery, its bark scars holding signs of disease or injury. Damage becomes not absence but evidence of endurance. Both bodies and landscapes can thus be understood as silent record-keepers, carrying memory within form.
Invisibility also plays a role in both human and arboreal survival. Spinal injuries or chronic illnesses may not be immediately apparent, just as internal damage to a tree can remain hidden until a cut reveals its rings. Yet invisibility does not mean non-existence. The presence of trauma, however concealed, continues to shape the living form. Arboreal metaphors counter this difficulty by offering visible symbols for hidden endurance.
The cultural erasure of women’s experiences of illness provides another dimension to this landscape. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn (2021) traces how women’s bodies have been misinterpreted, silenced, or pathologised, from Hippocratic medicine to the present. Conditions that resisted easy categorisation were dismissed or medicalised in ways that erased lived experience. There is a parallel here with how trees and landscapes are reshaped or disregarded when they fall outside human utility or aesthetic ideals. Trees are cut back or cleared when deemed “diseased”, much as bodies that deviate from medical norms are neglected. Both examples show how cultural forces determine visibility and value.
Yet trees and landscapes are more than passive symbols; they offer vocabularies for belonging, rooted in memory and lived experience. In Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home, Amanda Thomson (2020) reflects on how language and landscape become part of human identity. Place names, bird calls, and seasonal rhythms form an internal cadence that ties individuals to the environment. Trees act as anchors and witnesses to time, their rootedness both collective and personal, carrying histories that are shared yet intimate.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) expands this through his notion of topophilia, the affective pull of place, where space becomes charged with belonging. For Tuan, attachment emerges through a reciprocal exchange: environments shape us even as we shape them. Applied to the metaphors of pain, this suggests that the body does not merely exist within place but holds it. Environments are not neutral backdrops but active participants in how identity and endurance are formed.
Certain landscapes can therefore offer solace or recognition to those living with chronic pain. Unlike medical institutions, which often reduce bodies to symptoms, natural environments can provide companionship without demanding explanation. Altered trees lean yet endure; snags stand as defiant forms within their ecosystems. These landscapes offer space rather than constriction, allowing the sufferer to feel seen, not through diagnosis, but through kinship with the altered forms of the natural world.
To look at a scarred tree is to see both damage and persistence; to walk through a forest is to witness survival in multiple forms. Such metaphors enrich the language available for thinking about chronic pain, moving it beyond the limited vocabulary of stabbing or burning towards images that hold complexity and resilience. Arboreal metaphors do not resolve the difficulty of expressing pain, but they expand the imaginative terrain in which it can be situated. The body, like the landscape, is not static but adaptive, holding trauma as part of its ongoing life rather than as its negation.
The Spine, Trees, and Catastrophism
The spine occupies a unique place in both anatomy and imagination. It is at once a physical column of support and a symbolic structure through which fragility, order, and endurance are imagined. When considered alongside trees, another vertical form that bears time and weight, the parallels are striking. Both record their histories in material form. The surfaces of bark and bone reveal traces of trauma, while their internal structures hold memories of endurance and repair.
Sue Black’s forensic insights in Written in Bone show how the spine, like other bones, carries invisible histories that can be read with care and empathy (Black, 2021). Each calcification or fracture tells a story of injury and adaptation, transforming the body into an archive of endurance. The spine mirrors arboreal forms that also carry their past within them: a tree may stand upright while concealing hollows or scars beneath its bark, just as a spine may continue to bear weight while marked by unseen curvatures. Both remind us that endurance does not erase vulnerability but incorporates it.
This parallel finds another dimension in the philosophy of Spinal Catastrophism, where Fisher, Negarestani, and Thacker (2016) describe the spine as a vertical line upon which human ideas of order and consciousness precariously rest. It becomes a site of tension between control and collapse, a structure that allows uprightness yet constantly risks failure. This duality mirrors the experience of chronic pain, where the body remains functional yet continually negotiates fragility.
Trees embody this fragile vertical in their own way. Their height is an act of endurance against gravity, weather, and time, yet each carries the marks of its vulnerability. The snag, a skeletal remnant of a once-living tree, makes this visible. Though fractured and incomplete, it sustains new ecosystems within its form: mosses, fungi, insects, and birds thrive on what remains. The snag embodies a kind of collapse that enables life beyond itself, suggesting that deterioration and persistence can coexist. The image recalls how human fragility can generate new forms of adaptation, belonging, and even creativity.
Ideas of uprightness and crookedness, often bound up with moral or medical judgement, can also be reconsidered through this lens. Across many traditions, the spine has been idealised as a symbol of strength and discipline. Deviation from that line, through curvature, injury, or weakness, has been interpreted as deficiency. Yet when compared to trees, crookedness becomes an index of survival. Trees lean towards light, twist around damage, or grow at angles shaped by circumstance. Their forms embody resilience without symmetry. To live with a curved spine is to share in this adaptive persistence, where asymmetry records the body’s history rather than its failure.
This reframing challenges the notion that wellness equates to perfection. The snag resists straightness yet remains integral to the forest; likewise, the altered body continues to bear life while refusing to conform to imposed ideals of form. Endurance becomes an active process rather than a passive condition. Pain and adaptation are interwoven, creating lives that bend but do not break.
Both spine and tree also reveal that endurance is not solitary. Their strength depends on connection - roots, muscles, tendons, ecosystems - that sustain balance and growth. This situates chronic pain within a broader ecological framework, suggesting that survival is not an individual triumph but a collective one. It depends on interdependence, on forms of support that are both visible and unseen.
Seen in this way, the metaphors of spine and tree merge into a shared language of vulnerability and persistence. They reveal endurance as layered and relational rather than linear or pure. It is within this terrain that artists such as Giuseppe Penone find resonance, transforming these metaphors into material form and making visible the histories held within both body and tree.
Memory Carved in Form
Albero di 12 Metri (Penone, 1980–1982)
Giuseppe Penone’s sculpture practice explores the intimate and often unseen relationship between humans and the natural world. A central figure within Arte Povera, he treats trees not as raw material but as living counterparts in a shared process of remembering. In Albero di 12 Metri (Tree of 12 Metres), Penone carefully removes the outer layers of a felled trunk to reveal its younger self, hidden within the rings of growth. The act is part investigation, part tenderness: a slow uncovering that recalls how both the body and the landscape hold their own histories in physical form.
By revealing what lies beneath the surface, Penone blurs the line between anatomy and ecology. Carving becomes a quiet excavation, uncovering what persists through time rather than what has vanished. The newly exposed inner trunk resembles a spine, an upright structure shaped by endurance. Scars remain visible, folded into the life of the material rather than polished away.
This gesture echoes Sue Black’s approach in Written in Bone, where each small mark or fracture tells a story of adaptation. Penone’s method does not overwrite the tree’s past but allows it to speak through its altered form. Living with curvature or chronic pain involves a similar negotiation with one’s structure: learning to recognise difference as continuity rather than loss
There is resistance in Penone’s practice, a refusal to separate the organic from the human. Working backwards through wood, he reveals that memory does not fade with age but deepens, pressed into the grain of matter itself.
Towards an Emotional Geography of Pain and Belonging
Pain, particularly when chronic, is often internalised yet produces tangible spatial consequences. The lived experience of pain shapes how one moves through and relates to the world. The concept of emotional geography offers a way of tracing this reorganisation, not through maps or co-ordinates but through affect, memory, and relation. Yi-Fu Tuan’s Topophilia (1974) introduces this interrelation between emotion and place, describing how our attachments to environments arise from lived experience rather than geography alone. Such ideas can be extended into the realm of art, where the embodied act of making becomes another means of mapping emotional space (Mitchell and Meehan, 2022).
There are strong parallels between bark and bone. Both hold a kind of personal archive, bearing marks of endurance and the passage of time. As discussed in the previous section, artists such as Giuseppe Penone reveal how bodily and environmental forms mirror one another. In his work, the scarred surface of the tree becomes a metaphor for the lived body, each inscribed by forces of adaptation and resilience. This parallel draws attention to the blurred boundaries between self and environment, suggesting that perception itself is shaped through reciprocal exchange. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology helps to frame this connection, describing perception as an intertwining of body and world. Through this lens, the marks on bark and bone can be read as traces of a shared process of becoming (Moya, 2014).
The sense of belonging can be understood as an extension of this intertwining between body and world. Emotional bonds with place arise through lived experience and sensory engagement rather than through ownership or origin. Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of topophilia describes this affective connection as a form of love for place, grounded in memory and perception (Tuan, 1974). When filtered through the experience of pain, these attachments shift: familiar places may become estranged, while unfamiliar landscapes can evoke recognition. Pain, in this sense, reorganises belonging, redrawing its emotional geography (Davidson and Milligan, 2004).
If pain reshapes the boundaries of belonging, art becomes a means of charting its terrain. Through gesture, material, and repetition, the artist translates felt experience into form, creating a kind of emotional map. In this sense, artistic practice can render visible what is often wordless: the way memory and sensation inhabit space. As in the work of Penone, or in the reflective writing of Amanda Thomson, art traces the dialogue between body and landscape, allowing the internal to find spatial expression.
In tracing this interplay between pain, place, and art, what emerges is not a fixed geography but a shifting terrain of relation. Belonging becomes an ongoing negotiation between body and environment, shaped by vulnerability as much as by continuity. Pain exposes the permeability of these boundaries, revealing how self and landscape are co-constituted through shared fragility. Within this emotional ecology, art operates as both witness and mediator, offering forms through which connection can be felt, if not fully resolved.
Conclusion
Throughout this paper, I have explored how chronic pain, so often described as beyond the reach of language, can find articulation through visual and metaphorical form. By situating art as an alternative mode of communication, it becomes possible to understand pain not as isolation but as relation.
The metaphors of tree and spine, examined through the work of Giuseppe Penone, suggest that endurance is not a silent condition but a continuous process of adaptation. The marks left by trauma, whether in bark or bone, form part of a shared vocabulary through which memory and belonging take shape. Art here functions not as description but as translation, a language composed of matter, gesture, and attention.
To recognise pain within the wider ecology of living things is to recover a sense of belonging that language alone cannot provide. The altered body, like the altered tree, remains part of the landscape it inhabits, shaped by time yet still present within it.
In this way, art restores what pain erodes: the capacity to speak, to connect, and to belong. Its strength lies not in explaining suffering but in creating the conditions through which it can be seen, shared, and transformed. Like a scar within the wood, expression endures. Subtle, imperfect, and deeply human.
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Appendix
AI Usage Statement:
Artificial intelligence tools, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT-5), were used to assist with spelling and grammar refinement and citation formatting. The author retained full responsibility for all research content, and final editorial decisions. No AI-generated material was used as a substitute for critical analysis or original writing.
