Just as any love story does, the stories of violent relationships each develop differently. Though a relationship full of love should not be violent, even in a violent relationship there is still love. There is a very human hope and belief in love. Violence should not be hard to see, hard to distinguish, hard to name and yet it is. There are lines of power, control and anger that should not be crossed but they are crossed.
When we see violence from an outsider’s perspective and we want to understand it we place ourselves, or those we know, in the moment and we ask “What if it was me?” Why do we have to ask this question? When we don’t want to understand violence we push the stories away from us, and we say “that could never happen to me”. In this moment we are failing to understand that, like love, violence is all around us.
This work visualizes relationships I witness as a Domestic Violence advocate; their development through the cycle of violence, the perspectives surrounding the relationships, and the questions of what happens when love is pressured by violence and control.