Often outside research and collaboration provides the artist with relief from the self-cannibalization of the autobiographical processes of artmaking, or at least in the case of my practice. And so I set to the task to cull from without, specifically I looked to Freudâs âFragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (âDoraâ)â while simultaneously working with a collaborative team around notions of the lives of migrant cotton workers of the 1950s. Within the Freud research the attraction was less to the construction of hysteria than to Freudâs processes of unpacking dream derivations in gendered ground of primal propensities of sexual urge and perversion. Eventually however even this became less interesting than Freud's discussions of how an unconscious, repressed memory, thought and wish, work unbidden to find their way out of the body, oft in a repetitive fetish like manner. Freudâs claim, âno mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every poreâ (Freud, 1905, p. 215, 233) with the symptomatic âsomatic complianceâ becoming the tell of the repressed, seems relevant. So despite my desire and dependence on âDoraâ as an outside resource to prevent my self-cannibalizing art practice, Freudâs textual mullings on somatic compliance brought me back to dine at my own table for I have an awareness that my art practice is reliant on the unbidden chatter of my finger-tips . This is much evident in repetitive formal choices, compulsive making process and the unsettling nature of material choice that occurred despite collaboration on one project and research for another....