Searching for Beauty in the Context of Critical Illness

Pretty Sick is a multi-faceted project that includes a clamshell box with four handmade books, a dress made from hospital gowns, and a portfolio of images that deconstruct and reimagine the experience of illness—removing it from the confines of ill-lit hospital rooms and taking it to the garden using the simple imagery of flowers, leaves and forests.

Pretty Sick is designed to challenge the common, knee-jerk narrative that cancer patients must battle heroically against their disease while the rest of us mindlessly race for the cure and we all blithely ignore the environmental causes of the disease. As long as the fault and the fear are hidden behind the veil of survivorship, the polluter can go on polluting, the politicians can pontificate, and the pharmaceutical companies can continue to cash in. In this way, my work touches on issues of identity and environmental justice as well as raising questions about who has the right to represent the cancer patient as an individual and survivors, in general, as a group.

An illness, after all, unless you happen to have it, is an idea. And ideas can be manipulated. Something we all learned as the endless debates and obfuscations about masks and vaccinations revealed what cancer patients have known all along; there is a fashion to illness.

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images,” writes Joan Didion. “By the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” 

Organizing these photos into a group has been about giving voice to the sometimes confusing, often inchoate experience of illness and loss.  I crave both narrative coherence and closure. Art, for me, is a meaning making, memory changing machine. And that is a central theme in both my writing and my photo work.