Overview

2018

Exhibition series  / Installation/ Medical art

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In 2009, I began developing conflicting symptoms of progressive chronic pain and weakness - undiagnosed indications of fibromyalgia at the time. Years were followed by a confused blur of hospital waiting rooms, doctor clinics, MRI whirs, blood pricks and other strange, miscellaneous pokes, scans and jabs. Assigned days spent reorganising, archiving and tracking tests and symptoms across dates and files - meant inevitably learning to play detective with my own body.

 

Living with hidden illness accompanies with it a strange experience of dissonance between a visible seemingly able, "normal" self and the invisibility of a disabling physical condition. Often for many that cope with the chronic ambiguity of these symptoms - finding diagnosis, articulation or meaning, takes years of shifting through a swarm of medical ambiguity, dismissal and confusion.   .   

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Examining 8 years of diagnostic medical reports and scans, I screen and trace conflicts of invisibility, physicality and bodily experience; researching a medical environment that relies heavily on standardised scanning and testing, and examining the justification of definitive visible markers in diagnosing complex invisible illnesses.