Notokok

A bit about the piece from Tra Slaughter: Last year I was working with patients at a mental health facility providing art therapy. My therapist introduced me to a book, ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’ in which the author spent 12 years traveling the world creating new words for feelings and experiences that a word did not previously exist for. He combined different languages and dialects to come up with these words. The patients and I were inspired to create our own list of words. After we had a list, we created visual art to represent each word. One of the words I painted was, “Notokok” which means the act of being ok with not being ok. Here, this man has obviously been beaten and is bruised, bandaged and bloody, but he still has a happy look on his face and he seems perfectly ok with the situation even offering a metal salute to accentuate his positivity.