Practice
My work aims to make an invisible disability visible.
I am visually expressing the experience of living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and Long Covid in a way people can relate to.
My practice is informed by understanding that it is societal structures that disable people. My hope is that having awareness and understanding of the ‘invisible’ and visible disabilities people face, allows us to be more compassionate to one another, and become open to the different ways people can exist in society and contribute to it.
Most people will become disabled at some point in their life, so it seems worthwhile to strive to make that experience meaningful.
Hot-water bottles
I associate the hot-water bottle with illness, comfort and relief. It is an object that can connect the healthy and able to the chronically ill and disabled through shared experience. People know a hot-water bottle’s value when they occasionally feel weak, vulnerable or in pain, and through this they can relate to people who rely on one long-term.
Whether floating like a buoy at sea, or sinking into the ground, these partially submerged casts hopefully give the sense of movement frozen in time. This is a reference to ‘crip time’, which describes disabled individuals' unique relationship with time. It is also a response to being excluded from the rigid speed and efficiency of capitalist productivity standards. Instead it reimagines time as flexible, able to accommodate varied paces and needs.
Cassandra (the make of the bottle)
The Cassandra metaphor relates to a person whose valid warnings or concerns are disbelieved by others.
According to Greek mythology, the god Apollo became enamoured with the priestess Cassandra and granted her the power of prophecy, but, when she rejected him, sabotaged it with the curse that no one would believe her.
Until recently people with CFS/ME faced great challenges having their experiences believed and validated by the medical community. Instead they were often seen as weak, lazy or delusional.
Lampshades
My paintings convey the experience of chronically ill people by presenting what we see whilst bed-bound, resting or recovering. The paintings’ simplicity reflects our restrictions due to our diminished physical and mental capacities.
The selection of lampshade perspectives is from a wider collection, gathered from people with CFS. This focal point, seen from a position of interminable rest, is able to capture the experiences of waiting to feel a bit better, of pain and discomfort, of rage and numbness. The lampshade is a time-laps of mundane solitude.
