Ally Christmas: /bodycrumbs

Ally Christmas: /bodycrumbs by Daniel GeorgeMay 7, 2025

©Ally Christmas

For the next few days we are continuing to look at the work of artists who I met at this year’s Society for Photographic Education conference. Up next, we have /bodycrumbs by Ally Christmas. I actually reviewed Ally’s work a couple years ago during the Atlanta Center for Photography’s online reviews, but we reconnected (for the first time in-person) during SPE. It is always exciting when that happens!

Ally Christmas is a visual artist whose work revolves around notions of selfhood, healing rituals, and lived experience. Her hybrid practice involves varied mediums including digital video, constructed imagery, quilting and embroidery, palladium printing, and cyanotype on handwoven fabric. Christmas received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia in 2013, and her MFA in Photo/Video from the University of Georgia, after which she spent two years teaching video art and photography at Grinnell College as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Video and New Media. Since 2020, she has been teaching lens-based media as the coordinator of the BFA Photo Program at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV. She’s exhibited work at a wide variety of venues including bitforms gallery and Soho Photo Gallery in NYC; the Delaplaine Center for the Arts in Frederick, MD; ATHICA in Athens, GA; Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA; and the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO.

Ally’s work will be featured in the exhibition, DELUGE, at Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, GA from May 10th-June 8th 2025. An artist talk and reception will be held on Saturday, May 10th from 4-6 PM.

Follow Ally on Instagram: @allychristmas

©Ally Christmas

/bodycrumbs

/bodycrumbs began as a meandering, labyrinthine exploration of internal selfhood – questioning what it means to be, and tracing how all the intersecting, overlapping, conflicting parts of myself coexist together. More recently, the imagery and motivation behind the work have morphed towards a more uncomfortable exploration of external (m)otherhood – questioning who I am through the eyes of others and how I extend or project myself outwards now that I am a mother. This project has been a multi-year labor of love, and ‘labor’ is a key term I hope to unpack in this work; how can traditional forms of domestic labor (like sewing, weaving, mending, quilting) become vehicles for conveying meaning about embodiment and selfhood? While creating the work shared in this space, the ritualistic processes of image and object construction have invoked both a productive form of spiritual contemplation and a (perhaps) counter-productive remove from reality (read: repression, avoidance, *anxiously laughing emoji goes here*).

©Ally Christmas

Daniel George: Tell us how /bodycrumbs began. What led you to begin making work about the anxiety and migraines that you experience?

Ally Christmas: The project has taken many turns and morphed over the years, so while it started in 2019, it operates from a different place now than it did at first. Speaking to its origins: at the time, I was on year 10 of chronic migraines and year 1 of post-grad teaching. I remember one October evening in particular – my first fall semester at Grinnell College in Iowa – I was home alone and was suddenly completely overcome with anxiety for the future, grief for dreams unfulfilled, hopelessness for my medical issues. I sat in the dark and cried for hours. To be clear, this was not normal for me.

I think that teaching (or, getting any job after graduating at all) seemed like the cure-all to me after three years of my health deteriorating, my anxiety growing, and an ever-expanding separation between myself and my self that stemmed from my graduate studies. However, I quickly realized that happiness and fulfillment would not magically appear just from starting my new career – that’s when I had to return to making for the sake of making, a return to a process of becoming rather than a process of draining.

Therefore, the larger /bodycrumbs project began with a short film titled A MAD IMAGE, CHAFED, which was the first piece I made to illustrate what it feels like to have chronic migraines. Making it provided an intense form of healing and catharsis that I hadn’t experienced from artmaking before that point, perhaps because it was the first time I felt like people could begin to understand what I was going through, and the rest of the /bodycrumbs project has continued that trend, helping me process *all the feelings* over the past 6 years.

When I say the project has morphed, it now encompasses a great deal (perhaps too much): my struggles with chronic migraines and generalized anxiety disorder, the loss of my maternal grandmother, and the surreal / overwhelming experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. While these things may sound somewhat disparate, I find them all connected by the thread of legacy – what gets passed on between generations (what maladies, ticks and mannerisms, trauma, language), and how can I break the perpetuation of negative threads, or at least question them in meaningful ways?

©Ally Christmas

DG: All of your work that we can see on your website, including this project, deals with self. Where would you say this autobiographical approach to art-making stems? What do you feel it offers?

AC: This is a question I struggled with for a long time, because like many other people who often feel inhibited by anxiety, I have extreme impostor syndrome in all things. Who would care about my work (and why) when it is solely focused on me and my own experiences? I’ve spent a good deal of time researching the psycho-social aspects of narcissism, as well as the Greek myth of Narcissus (and, indeed, have made art that went down this rabbit hole).

One of my earliest artistic influences was Francesca Woodman, and I still remember there was a point in undergrad when I was reading a book about her, and she was essentially asked this same question. She said something along the lines of using herself mainly out of convenience – that she was always available to herself. I think that’s where it started for me as well, but over time it became a valuable method of therapy.

I should also acknowledge that I have a healthy skepticism of photographing others. I know myself better than I know anything else, so I have full authority and autonomy to speak on my behalf through art. Ultimately, though, my hope is that while my art is about deeply personal experiences, others may find some of these things relatable.

©Ally Christmas

DG: I was drawn to the ways in which you use image/print manipulation in your photographs. Would you share more about your process and why you feel these physical interventions are significant for this work?

AC: In the few years leading up to this project, I was making heavily digitized work – everything existed within and because of a screen. I combined digital video and screen-captured imagery of myself to speak to the notion of split subjectivity that occurs between one’s self and one’s mirror image. Within that framework, I was using the glitch as a metaphor to speak to the points of breach and overlap between those resulting selves. Now, I use physical collage and ruptures/holes/breaks in materials for the world-making in my imagery, and I see the glitch as one of the key ties between my older work and this project.

The glitch as a visual strategy marks the points, or ruptures, at which two distinct threads of time or space begin to touch and blend together or break down. While the more recognizable form of the glitch usually marks some kind of error in a software program, I’ve translated that to my /bodycrumbs work as errors in physical spacetime (the ‘physical interventions’ you see) – holes in a piece of cloth, a ripped edge across my torso, a thread that seems to weave both inside and beyond the frame of a photograph, or small punctures around the edge of my eye. The glitch as puncture, wound, hole, rip, rupture… this is a bit of a callback to Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum – that subjective thing that shoots out of the picture like an arrow and pierces the viewer.

As the glitch has become more physical, I’ve also tried to use it as a method for digging into my deep-seated body horror fears of trypophobia (the irrational aversion to small clusters of holes or bumps, but especially in the body). If I lean into these fears by using images of my body in my art, I hope to desensitize myself to them. I’ve had to consider what forms of layering and puncturing – whether physical or digital, corporeal or psychological – can create feelings of both self-abjection and self-healing: a delicate and challenging balance! This takes shape through the meticulous construction of images where I play in the spaces between physical and digital, corporeal and psychological – creating images that then get manipulated and re-manipulated until the thresholds between real and surreal start to dissolve. That dissolution is also kind of like a peeling back – like I’m trying to peel back the top layer of reality in order to reveal another world beneath… a world of generational trauma and anxieties, unprocessed grief, chronic pain, and concerned questions about the past and future of my lineage – especially now, with a little human that literally came out of me and existing in the world.

©Ally Christmas

DG: I am intrigued by the name of the project. It makes me think of this idea of remnants — or what is leftover from something larger, or whole. Maybe they seem insignificant, but they are consequential when gathered together. Would you share your insights into this title?

AC: Back in grad school, my initial interest in bodycrumbs stemmed, in part, from the concept of digital breadcrumbs – like cookies or metadata that get stored and track our behaviors and journeys through virtual spaces (or what we could also call ‘data shadows’). This requires a constant splitting of self, breaking lived experience apart across the virtual, past, present, and future iterations of self. Again, the visual and concept of the glitch played a key role in this earlier work as a marker for overlapping selves, a portal between selves or dimensions, and a location of dissonance or anxiety.

When revisiting the bodycrumbs term a couple years later, I decided to do a deeper dive into yet another Greek myth – the one about Ariadne’s thread, where warrior Theseus had to go into the monstrous Minotaur’s labyrinth to slay the beast, and princess Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread to mark his path through the Minotaur’s labyrinth in order to make his way safely back out after killing the Minotaur. This is when I began incorporating embroidery thread into my work, seeing myself as the thread – as the stretched-out entity marking a path of movement or projected travel, or as a lifeline to be held onto or followed out of the darkness (anxiety, pain, grief, etc.). I’ve continued to investigate what else the ‘thread’ might be that helps me find my way back out of my own inner labyrinth, away from my anxiety and chronic pain, and then grief, and how that thread might actually be harmful as it leaves an identifying trail of breadcrumbs (bodycrumbs) in my wake.

Questions that I continue to ask in this vein: How do I extend myself outward, and what leads me more inwards? What do I try to cut away and what do I try to suture back in?

©Ally Christmas

DG: I am always interested in the creative process’ role in mitigating the effects of physical and emotional hardship. Or, at least its potential to help one cope with a negative situation. Could you talk more about how this project has provided a space of healing?

AC: I recently invited artist and writer Julie Rae Powers to speak with one of my photo classes about their work, and they said something that really stuck with me: “Art can be healing, but art cannot heal you.” While artmaking hasn’t ever been able to take pain away fully, it has played a substantial role in helping me deal with more psychological and emotional forms of pain. For my anxiety, certain repetitive acts have been important – repetitive acts that became rituals. The term ‘ritual’ has been used by psychologists in a technical sense to signal a repetitive behavior systematically used by someone in order to neutralize or prevent their own anxiety. Rituals don’t have to revolve around flashy embellishments or marvelous acts; they can be subtle and subdued, as long as they are imbued with intention. How can a repeated action, phrase, or sound enact a process of healing, or a process of grappling with difficult or negative emotions? I think one of my main rituals has manifested itself by finding ways to cut parts of myself off, or puncture parts of myself, or just visually contemplate the idea of self-amputation in order to protect myself from external forces (or maybe from internal forces).

This project has also spanned the death of my maternal grandmother, pregnancy, and new motherhood – all events which have required significant healing and restructuring my sense of self. While creating each piece of /bodycrumbs, the ritualistic processes of image construction/deconstruction, quilting, weaving, and embroidering have provided conscious removal from a difficult reality.