On working with a limited body

Notes on process, limitation and artistic voice

This text reflects on how long-term illness has shaped my artistic practice — not only in terms of working methods and materials, but in how I relate to time, presence and artistic voice. It offers a context for the work, rather than an explanation of it.

For a long time, my health has been something I have kept in the background of my artistic work. Not because it hasn’t mattered, but because I was unsure of how to speak about it without it overshadowing the work itself. Over time, I have come to understand that this silence has also shaped how my work is read — and what remains unseen.

Living with a body that does not respond to effort in predictable ways affects everything: how daily life is navigated, how energy is measured, how recovery is possible. This reality has shaped not only my life, but the conditions under which my artistic practice exists.

My working methods have had to evolve in close collaboration with my body and its limitations. The way I handle tools, the duration of each working session, the materials I return to, and the surfaces I choose are all direct responses to what my body can sustain. There is no separation here between health and technique. They are inseparable.

Over time, printmaking paper has become a crucial partner in this process. It is not simply a surface, nor merely a practical or aesthetic choice. I have learned to listen to it, to work with its sensitivity rather than against it. The paper responds to presence, to restraint, to touch that is attentive rather than forceful. In this sense, it has become a collaborator — a material that meets the work halfway and allows the image to emerge through dialogue rather than control. My materials are not neutral. They participate in the work.

Living with long-term illness has also reshaped my relationship to time. Progress cannot be rushed. Effort cannot be forced without consequence. What remains is attention, patience, and a heightened awareness of thresholds — between energy and depletion, movement and stillness, inner and outer worlds. These thresholds are not conceptual metaphors added afterwards; they are lived conditions that inform how the work comes into being.

This has inevitably influenced my artistic voice. My work has moved away from explanation and assertion, and closer to suggestion, quietness and resonance. I am interested in what is sensed rather than declared, in what is already present but easily overlooked. This is not an escape from reality, but a different way of inhabiting it.

While my practice is shaped by bodily limitations, it does not remain confined to them. The work reaches beyond the physical condition of a single body and towards broader questions of presence, perception and existence. At the same time, I do believe that bodies and lives that unfold at a different pace must be acknowledged as a natural part of our shared world — including within the field of art. Not as exceptions, but as equally valid ways of being and working.

It is only at this point that I choose to name the illness itself. I live with ME — a serious, still profoundly misunderstood condition, surrounded by disbelief, minimisation and structural neglect. For many who live with it, ME entails not only physical limitation, but the experience of being questioned, dismissed or rendered invisible. This context matters. It shapes how one moves through the world, and how one learns to listen — closely, carefully — to what is possible.

To speak openly about health in relation to art is still considered uncomfortable in many contexts. Yet for me, separating the two would be dishonest. My practice exists because of constant adaptation, restraint and listening — to materials, to space, and to the body itself.

Lifting this veil is not an act of confession. It is an act of clarity. My work is shaped by limitation, but it is not defined by lack. It is defined by attentiveness, persistence and a commitment to work with what is possible — and to make that possibility visible.