As artists and writers we are very lucky as we have our practice to turn to when life throws us difficult times and we need a place to escape and work it through. Or is the very part of being an artist and the process of making detrimental to our health? Silence halts the mending of our body as discussed by Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score and as artists we can use our platform, process and practise to break the silence and start to heal. Stephen K. Levine further explains ... “The task of therapy is not to eliminate suffering but to give a voice to it, to find a form in which it can be expressed. Expression is itself transformation; this is the message that art brings. The therapist then would be an artist of the soul, working with sufferers to enable them to find the proper container for their pain, the form in which it would be embodied.”
Here are the responses to this month’s theme.
Artist name: The Naked Artist
Instagram: @suziepindar
Distortion: This image reflects the anxiety that lives in my entire body at the moment, making art, photographs is a helpful process too try and manage it, it’s like it helps me feel peaceful within myself.
Artist name: Jodie Beardmore
Instagram: jbeardmorephoto_
Website: https://www.jodiebeardmorephotography.co.uk/
Traces: This image presents my Grandma’s hands double-exposed amongst the flowers my Grandparents grew together. The flowers that are left behind continue to bloom and impact the world just like their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will go on to do.
Artist name: Claire Morton
Instagram: @claire8353
Website: www.clairemorton.weebly.com
Betty Pops Out For A Pint Of Milk, Felt, machine stitch with collage
Since being diagnosed with CLL Leukaemia Blood Cancer a few years ago Claire Morton has been studying the health benefits of knitting and felting and uses them as art therapy and a way to express herself. The process of felting requires focus and concentration, so it has an inbuilt meditative quality. It can be a peaceful, calming activity. The quality of wool is tactile and soft, whilst the colours of the wool are vibrant and uplifting. It helps Claire get into a state where she is fully absorbed in what she is doing (often called “flow”) which has similar benefits to meditation. During a creative endeavour like needle felting, not only is the mind focused on the project, but the motion of the hands work to settle the nervous system. Which actively sooths emotions and let's the rest of the world fade to the background.
The Colourful Characters are made from the imagination. The title of the artwork brings forth story-telling and enables the viewer to join in the conversation about who the Characters may be.
Artist name: Laura Campbell
Instagram: @Laura.Campbell.art
Bio: My practice is informed by research into disability and personal representation, using printmaking, painting and performance as reoccurring expressive elements of communication. My practice aims to contribute to conversations surrounding disability within the visual arts whilst researching how my own experience of pain and disability fits within socio-political spheres within the contemporary fine arts, through navigating my disabled body within artistic spaces.
Stretch: A double exposure of three black and white photographs as performance documentation. The digital imagery features my distorted disabled body, printed onto using Lino Prints and ink, layered to create a sense of distortion through ambiguity.
Artist name: Rebecca Andrew
Instagram: @bexart2019
Website: https://beckyeandrew.wixsite.com/mysite
“I Can’t Remember Your Hands, Part 2” Acrylic and Ink on sterling Board H 95.5 x W101cm Although quite simple in its construction and use of the formal elements, this piece is incredibly honest in its immediacy, reflecting the intense sense of grief inferred. I used my hands to manipulate the materials in direct contact with the surface. “I Can’t Remember Your Hands” refers to a conversation held with a friend, in which she told me of her memories of her mother. She told me how she remembered the tips of her mother’s fingers - their shape and their colour. I felt a huge sense of despair and frustration about not being able to remember what my recently deceased friend’s hands looked like. I couldn’t see them. I was at once terrified of forgetting everything. I revisited and worked through this feeling whilst painting. The process involved working ink into the emptiness of white acrylic paint, subtracting the paint further in areas, indicating loss – the abrupt removal of something that was once there and the indelible traces that remain. Denser white marks interrupt the black foreground, which although rich in texture and direction, is flat in depth of colour, adding to the sense of hollowness. These white interruptions indicate hope amidst despair as they transcend the black towards and away from cruciform structures in the distance.
Artist name: Roger Gregory
Instagram: @rogergregoryartist
Website: https://www.contemporarycollage.art/
Bio: With my intuitive understanding of the body I deconstruct and symbolise the body’s form in order to make abstract artworks that eliminates societal labels and imposed barriers, in order to describe the human condition. I practice art as a major response to living with severe disabilities. With a wide variety of personal obstacles to overcome, the hardest is to maintain the mantra “baby steps work”!
Title; “Not Gibberish?“ no.12. - BRAIN Recollection of holding a human brain and how new scanning technology delivers amazing images.
Artist: Jenna Fox
Instagram: @jennafoxartist
Title: Living With
This sculpture was created from recycled wood and beers cans to physically show how difficult it is to live with either physical or mental pain that others cannot see. The piece is awkward and heavy (28kg). She lived with it day and night for three days, dragging around, sleeping in bed and showering with it. The art became the message and the message the art.
Artist name: Sam Sherborne
Instagram:@samsherborne
Website: http://www.samsherborne.co.uk/
Description: “Hot water” makes sense of a distressing childhood memory. As in the process of EMDR, making the sculpture recoded the trauma memory in a new form, allowing me to experience it from an adult perspective. The rigid, photographic memory transferred easily into metallic form.
Artist name: Carys Reilly
Instagram: @carysreilly
Website: carysreilly.com
Description: ‘Laparoscopy' This series of paintings looks at the misinformation surrounding endometriosis, and how often women's pain is believed to be partly psychological or emotional in nature. I was taken aback at how similar the language used by doctors about my endometriosis was to how they used to describe women diagnosed with 'hysteria'. The text on the paintings is taken directly from consultations with doctors where I was told that I was too emotionally fragile for surgery, and that the pain was caused by my overthinking about the condition. Conditions that are associated with - and primarily affect - women are often represented euphemistically, using hyperfeminine and domestic imagery like flowers and textiles. I wanted to challenge this depiction by viscerally representing the brutality of surgery and the pain of this condition.
Artist name: Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo
Instagram: @antibiotyx
Description: “Heart of Scraps”. Retroactive System: An Anatomical Rubbish is a series of images that seek to capture the inevitable symbiosis between the environment and the human body through the visual intervention of x-ray images. The manipulation of these x-rays is also a symbolic one. As such, x-rays utilize a type of radiation not visible to the naked eye that is able to pass through the body to create images of the inside, and, in turn, detect a range of conditions. Embedded in these images is the reality that our continuous struggle to counter human's exploitation of the environment “runs deep in our system”, and this needs to be primarily addressed to ensure a thriving future. Here I emphasize that environmental threats and health concerns are an issue of the individual as much as it is global.
Artist name: Nicole Lyster - N L Ceramics
Instagram: @niceramics
Website: https://www.nlceramics.org/
Description: “Medicine Cabinet skewed”. 30x30x5cm stoneware ceramic and medical grade glass vials. Stand alone or wall hung. This piece is made from just over one months supply of my son's nebulised antibiotic medication vials. There are three vials used in each cabinet square. The first is melted into the body of the shelves so it is unrecognisable. The second is melted in to the back of each square so it creates a shadowed form. The third is stood on the shelf in its original form. Living with a life limiting long term condition takes up the whole of ones existence on many levels, some impacts are obvious, some are seen in the shadows, some are deeply embedded in the fabric of existence - all are an essential part of the whole to make sense of it.
Artist name: Amanda Van Der Zant
Instagram: @puddy63
Description: “The Pool”. Using a wash of acrylic paint I have created a background for my canvas. I then screen printed an image I captured on my GoPro camera taken under the water. This allows the viewer to see the perspective of the black line along the bottom of the pool and the floating lane rope above the water's surface. I finished my painting with splashes of acrylic paint and ink to create a view for my audience of entering the water with bubbles and reflections that you see when diving into the water. Mixed Media on Canvas 75cm x 45cm x 2cm.
Artist name: Natalia Millman
Instagram: @nataliamillmanart
Website: www.nataliamillmanart.com
Description: “Grief elixir”. These pieces are part of my latest body of work on grief after I lost my dad to dementia a couple of years ago. Going through the six stages of grief, tears continually float through me touching upon my conciseness and accumulating in the jar helping me heal.
Artist name: Dianne Augustine
Instagram: @dia_nne_marie
Description: “The State of my Mind-Behind the Arch”. Dianne aimed to personify the effects of fibromyalgia, Fatigue and neuropathy nerve pain has on her mental well-being.
Artist name: Mary Rouncefield
Instagram: @maryrouncefield
Website: www.maryrouncefield.co.uk
Description: “Body Armour”. Body Armour Mixed media and empty pill containers 60 x 80 x 19cm Until recently, our society has seen anxiety, depression, and mental illness as signs of weakness. Lately though some celebrities have spoken out about their experiences of mental illness, and this has helped. Even so, there are now 4 million people in Britain taking antidepressants. How many others are trying to ward off infections with vitamins, herbal remedies and other off-the-counter drugs? This piece is a comment on the use of drugs and alternative remedies to ward of physical and mental illness.
Artist name: Bini Atkinson
Instagram: @biniatkinson
Website: biniatkinson.wixsite.com/bini https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/.../day-life-bini-atkinson dwelltimepress.wordpress.com https://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/case-studies/my-body
Description: “Myelin Denial”. Patient Information Medication , Medication Pharmacy Bag. Word stitched into a folded book using red thread. Responding to participants words around their medication.
Artist name: Lesley O'Neill
Instagram: @lesleyoneillartwork
Website: https://www.lesleyoneill-artwork.org
Description: “You Are Stuck In My Throat”. Linocut. 2020. My grief is stuck in my throat. The concept of my work was returning to it after a twenty five year absence after the sudden death of my twenty four year old Son.
I made the pieces of work as a tribute to him and because it was the only thing I wanted to do after his loss and it helped enormously.
The work was created from July 2020, I also had Long Covid and was caring for my Mother but once again it saved me.