In FAULTY ALARM SYSTEM (LEFT HIP), Savannah Jarvis considers chronic pain as a warning system that no longer functions as it should. The title borrows from the language often used to describe persistent pain, where the body continues to signal danger despite the absence of an immediate threat.

By locating the work specifically in her left hip, Jarvis makes an abstract neurological experience distinctly personal and bodily. The painting speaks to the disorienting relationship between sensation and threat, and to living within a body whose internal alarms can sound without warning. As throughout Jarvis’s practice, an invisible experience is translated into an image, giving form to something felt intensely but unseen by others.