Jesus Torio

Like many of the best things in life, this project started with a mistake.

The printer broke in February, turning my images into illegible lines of primary colour. They were the kind of lines that every owner of a printer suffers from time to time, but they were breaking down the images completely.

It is then that I realized I did not want to fix the printer anymore, but to fix the images.

As a nurse, working in a dementia ward for the last seven years, these broken images reminded me of the broken memories of my patients, or my own broken memories.

The months of working during covid were probably the hardest time of my life. I was finishing my BA in photography when the world stopped, and I was called into work. I was working almost every day, trying to finish my Major Project, lying to my parents in Spain, telling them everything was fine in Edinburgh.

In the summer of `21, when we all finally got some relief, I got depression, like many health workers. If, before, I did not have enough time to make photographs, now I did not have the strength. It was painful to even look at my old work.

So, I printed it all with the broken machine, to fix every image—to accept them. Because when you work as a nurse you become a hypochondriac, you fear every disease, and there is no disease I fear most than the disease of forgetting who I am, what I did.

This book is a time capsule, a fight against fear, and a celebration of the beauty of life. I tried to create a visual story—from when I was a kid to when I became an artist, from when I discovered lust to when I discovered love.

After six years of working as a nurse, the pandemic started.

It was a confusing and fearful time where my colleagues and I fought every day towards the unknown.

At the time I was working in a dementia ward in Edinburgh, far away from my family in Spain, who are health workers too.

My studies in photography stopped, my day a day stopped, and all I was doing was fighting.

For a year and a half, we kept like this. And when the last summer I could finally relax at home, I felt all the pressure accumulated coming to me.

I felt blue and anxious. I didn't want to leave the bed due to a strange weakness. I had depression with PTSD.

And like this, I arrived in London to study for my second year at the Royal College.

Thanks to my tutor Edward, I realized I need it to explore these feelings. So I did it.

Using the words of my diaries at the time of the pandemic as a brush, I paste different texts one over the other until they became illegible. Because I wanted to forget.

I create forms using my words, forms similar to X-Rays because I was trying to look inside of myself.

I chose to use only colours from the nurses' uniforms in the UK because this project is for all of them. I created my own blue, a mix of pigments and Majorelle Blue from Ives Saint Laurents´s house in Marracheck.

The work is divided into 4 parts:

First: Accumulation of thoughts- As in depression, the thoughts and ideas accumulate in our minds until a point where it is impossible to keep going (I to VI).

Second: Negation- When we finally feel low, when we try to forget and wipe out reality (VII to IX).

Third: Scar- When you finally start feeling better. But like after a wound heals, a scar stay. It is a reminder of what happened, and it will change with time. For that reason, this section is made in Newsprint, a kind of paper that degrades and changes with time (Scars)

Fourth: Life- Life is an accumulation of scars, or dealing with problems and being successful. To grow up is to be able to pass through these encounters. It is a wonderful feeling. These prints are made in thin and translucent paper. All of them together are put on an X-Rays viewer, so the light allows you to see through.

Of course, this is a personal interpretation, and a memorial to all the health workers who gave their time, even their lives, during the pandemic.

One last thing. After I finished this project, I felt myself again.

There is always hope.

I decided to add this last part to allow the viewer to see how I started the course.

It was a big change for me to break from the photographic medium to the painting. I started experimenting with screen prints for the first time with some of my old images and new ones.

I loved it so much the technique that in a couple of weeks I was hooked.

From a Shell that represents the beginning of life, to a mountain made of thousand of Shells, my aim was to understand the transformation all living beings go through.

This process of degradation inspired me to do the same with my own images.

"Three Figures At The Vanishing Point" is a reflection of the past of time, the memories saved in our mind and the catharsis that occur to them after years. The brain has the ability to transform our memories, so through mechanical and digital processes, I recreated three stages of an image; the original, and two transformations.

The last images "Triptych For Ukraine", take this process further to create an abstraction in the memory of all those who are suffering the war.

Decomposition of images through mechanical and digital techniques.