Presented as a before and after, these paired paintings consider the profound shift in how the body, and the world around it, can be experienced following injury and the onset of chronic pain.

In TWIN PEAKS (BEFORE INJURY), the staircase is ordered and stable. Its architecture is clearly defined, its perspective familiar, and the patterned runner follows a predictable path through the composition. In Wobble: TWIN PEAKS (AFTER INJURY), Jarvis returns to the same staircase, but its structure has begun to buckle and distort. Straight lines become unstable, the carpet swells and contracts, and a once-familiar domestic space becomes difficult to navigate.

The transformation reflects Jarvis’ own experience of chronic pain, and the way pain can fundamentally alter a person’s relationship with their body and surroundings. Rather than depicting pain itself, Jarvis gives visual form to its effects: instability, disorientation, and the sense that something familiar can suddenly feel uncertain.

The white horizontal bars reference the Twin Peaks model, a framework for understanding pain as part of the body’s protective system. Normally, the “protect by pain” threshold sits just below the level at which tissues are at risk. In persistent pain, however, this protective threshold can become dramatically lowered, while tissue tolerance may change far less. The result is an increasingly sensitive alarm system: pain as a response can be produced much earlier, creating a widening gap between the experience of pain and the actual risk of harm. Across the two paintings, these markers shift in response to the world around them changing, connecting the clinical language used to quantify pain with the far more complex lived experience of it.

Together, the works create two versions of the same space: one before injury, and one after. The pairing speaks to a dividing line in Jarvis’ life, while asking how an experience as subjective and difficult to articulate as pain might be made visible through painting.