Community:
Artists & Artworks that inspire us
We are collating an A to Z list of artists and art works we've found exploring chronic pain and illness, healthcare, and shifting relationships with our bodies.
Are we missing your art? If you or creatives you know would like to be featured, please feel welcome to reach out.
Adelaide Damoah
Visual Arts
Painter (She/her) - “But, beyond shaping her career, endometriosis has a profound impact on her creative style and artistic process too. Although her art covers many themes unrelated to the condition including sexual harassment, colonialism, and her Ghanian roots, even here the relationship to her body that her diagnosis helped create informs her work.”
Alterknit Universe
Visual Arts
Bristol-based wool shop and community, led by crafter Kim. "The shop and Kim’s personal social media (instagram and youtube mostly) attract many other crafty people with hidden disabilities and illnesses. It’s a place to feel safe, hold something that been created with love, and remind yourself that we are all striving to be positive and productive members of society."
Birth Control Your Own Adventure
Screen and Video
Visual essay by Signha Agha "A sparklingly cutting film featuring a cast of sinister Icelandic sheep, clumsy endives and an OB-GYN who talks with the voice of a robot. Agha makes insightful and snark use of these tools to chronicle the epic saga of her struggle with the side effects of birth control medication." - The New York Times
Blindful
Performance
Adelaide-based performance artist Abbie Madden (She/her) exploring eyesight and vision in performance. “Blindful represents making dance and circus accessible to anyone and everyone.”
Body Language Season 1: Painful Sex
Screen and Video
Visual essay by Signha Agha, presented on BBC Three.
Body Language Season 2: ADHD
Screen and Video
“an episode about the rampant underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of women with ADHD. In this film, a woman shares her story of spending over a decade on antipsychotics for a condition she never had, only to find out in her 30s that it was ADHD all along.”
Bri Noonan
Visual Arts
"Bri Noonan (they/them) is located in Phoenix, AZ... Their work is primarily based within their relationship ties and their own personal self reflection. This includes exploring depression, anxiety, chronic illness and queerness."
Diana Divine
Performance
Diana is self-dubbed "unable to dance and insistent on doing so naked", a burlesque performer and producer of such shows as Disability Cabaret.
ENDO GIRL
Screen and Video
20-minute short film by Sophia Bender driving awareness to endometriosis as an “insidious disease” through her passion for ballet.
Gusset Grippers
Performance
Elaine is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and passionate about breaking taboos which prevent help-seeking.
Human Becomings
Visual Arts
Artist Lex Randolph (He/him). "Human Becomings exemplifies the constant change of human identity, and challenges how physical bodies contribute to our sense of self."
Imani The Author
Writing
Imani is an incredible young writer based in WA who recognised a gap in representation for kids with Elhers Danlos Syndrome and chronic illnesses. At just 12 years old, they wrote and self-published their first work 'Mysteries of Maybelle' which is available for $12 with profits donated to chronic illness charities each month. Their books are available via their website.
Julia Rose
Writing
Julia Rose is a "queer, takatāpui writer, survivor and abolitionist living with chronic illness in Narrm, so-called Melbourne" who posts some incredibly real words on Instagram.
Micaela Schmidt
Performance
Micaela Schmidt is a theatre maker/performer, teaching artist and access consultant who is totally blind. She offers tutoring in music, creative writing, and literary braille.
Michelle Vine
Visual Arts
Michelle Vine is an installation, performance, and photo media artist. "In my studio practice I am fascinated by how allowing touch, and making works specifically to be touched, adds to the experience of installation art. My interest in touch and human sensory experience grew from lived experience of chronic illness."
Mindful Movement Mentality
Performance
Created by Melbourne-based circus artist Kate Nelson, Mindful Movement Mentality is an online personal training practice to help find movement to love your body.
Mullygrubs
Performance
Written by Leah Filley and Harry Thompson, this theatre piece premiered at Melbourne Fringe 2019 using the guise of two millennials in a backroom at a house party to dive deep into gritty territory of mental health, and touches on Filley’s honest experiences of chronic pelvic pain.
Our Manic Mates
Podcast
A podcast about Bipolar Australians and the live's they live. Created by Perth based musician and mental health activist, Jakeb Stevenson.
Rana 2.0
Visual Arts
Rana is an artist and entrepreneur (She/her) based in NYC who creates colourful digital works exploring chronic illness.
Self Preservation
Performance
Scout Boxhall’s “beautiful new play exploring the complicated relationship between people with chronic illnesses and their medication. The piece, divided in three distinct acts exploring three illnesses, combines elements of physical theatre, poignant monologues, and some dark humour.”
Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain
Writing
"Shaping the Fractured Self showcases twenty-eight of Australia’s finest poets who happen to live with chronic illness and pain. The autobiographical short essays, in conjunction with the three poems from each of the poets, capture the body in trauma in its many and varied moods. Because those who live with chronic illness and pain experience shifts in their relationship to it on a yearly, monthly or daily basis, so do the words they use to describe it."
Sins Invalid
Performance
US-based performance project - “Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.”
Small Supply
Visual Arts
Handmade goods by Danielle Freiman - Carries handmade goods for mental health, healing, and self care. She created the shop as a platform for talking about things that are hard to talk about and sharing her experiences with mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
Sol Kammer
Visual Arts
Artist Sol Kammer (previously Ellie Kammer) draws on her own experiences with chronic health conditions and translates them into bold and confronting images that speak to an underrepresented community: people living with disability or illness.
That's So Chronic!
Podcast
Podcast created by Jess The Mess (Jess Brien) interviewing some incredible people from around the world that are thriving - and sometimes only just surviving - with chronic illnesses, life changing injuries, and potentially disastrous diagnoses.
The Invisible Illness Project
Screen and Video
An indie documentary series development based in Boorloo (Perth, WA) exploring the experiences of young people with invisible chronic illnesses and disabilities.
The Nightstand Collective
Visual Arts
Photo Series by Emma Jones - “The nightstand collective is an exploration of chronic illness through the intimate space of the bedroom nightstand.”
Tightly Wound
Screen and Video
“Tightly Wound is a 10-minute animated film that follows Shelby’s experience with vaginismus; a pelvic floor condition characterized by involuntary contractions of the pelvic floor muscles that tighten the vaginal entrance, causing pain, penetration problems, and inability to have intercourse. It chronicles the various ways it has affected her life – how health professionals have failed her, men have rejected her, and shame, anger, and hatred have plagued her body."
UNREST
Screen and Video
Feature Documentary (Available on Netflix) - “Jennifer Brea is about to marry the love of her life when she’s struck down by a fever that leaves her bedridden. When doctors tell her “it’s all in her head,” she turns her camera on herself and her community as she looks for answers and fights for a cure.”
UNWOMAN
Performance
UNWOMAN is an epic and imagistic piece of feminist theatre created in both Ireland and Australia, examining reproductive rights, experiences of pregnancy and bodily autonomy.
Underart by Cirkus Cirkör
Performance
"Olle Strandberg has a background in acrobatics and juggling. In December 2005 he broke his neck doing a triple somersault and was paralyzed from the neck down. Olle's latest production, Underart, is based on his own story, but is not an exact staging of any precise course of events."
