The bold blue colour that forms the ground of Nerves is inspired by the Hospital Blues uniform worn by convalescing soldiers in British military hospitals in the early twentieth century. This intense colour field is overlaid with drawings of nerves and nerve endings as they were understood in 1916. The text fragments are phrases and expressions that use the word “nerve”, though the word itself is removed. English has many aphorisms around nerves: “a bag of nerves”, a “battle of nerves”, “a war of nerves”, “nerves of steel”…  This gesture creates an abstract, almost code-like pattern that viewers can decipher, and acts as an analogue for the frayed consciousnesses produced by shell-shock on the battlefield.