Must I suffer for my art? I chose pencil-crayon rather than paint because drawing demands a slow, repetitive physical endurance that emulates my experience of living in a painful body.  

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Sick of Being Sick (Good Days and Bad Days) explores the fluctuating rhythm of illness. Some days offer clarity and possibility; others are shaped by pain, fatigue and limitation. The repetitive act of drawing mirrors the repetitive labour of living with hidden illness: taking medication, attending appointments, managing symptoms and beginning again each day.

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The work comprises sixteen vintage collectors’ frames and twelve pill still-lifes. Prescriptions ​curated by doctors form a personal archive of treatment, dependency and survival. By carefully drawing and displaying them, I transform what is usually hidden inside medicine cabinets into something precious, public and worthy of attention.

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I use coloured pencils to ​both seduce, reveal and conceal. By blending away the line, I tr​eat pencil crayon as I might treat paint, disguising the evidence of its making. The drawings appear decorative, while gradually revealing questions about pain and the pharmaceutical industry​ and dependency. A spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, perhaps.