Juliet Chenery-Robson
- Statement
When my daughter became ill with ME
four years ago I found myself cast as a traveler between two worlds,
worlds that are eloquently described by Susan Sontag in her book Illness
as Metaphor:
Illness is the night-side of life,
a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,
in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although
we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of
us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens
of that other place.
Residing in the world of the well I
felt assuaged with guilt at not being able to offer my daughter any
firm answers as to why she was trapped in the land of the sick. And,
because ME is still shrouded within an aura of disbelief and misconception,
I decided to explore ways in which, through photography, this invisible
illness could be made visible to a disbelieving audience.
Subject matter for my project ‘Unpredictable Patterns’ followed
three themes: one part consisted of still life and constructed imagery;
the everyday objects, places and spaces that metamorphose into new worlds
and vistas in the face of chronic illness, inviting the viewer to discover
their own ‘meaning’, coloured by individual experience.
Alongside this I produced a series of six portraits of young women who
also suffer from ME. Posed within the confines of their own bedrooms
the models hold a favourite soft toy to express their vulnerability
and show how, by reverting back to a childlike state, they seek comfort
from the familiar as they attempt to cope with living in the “kingdom
of the sick”. In keeping with this theme of observation I also
drew correlations with a similar illness that was prevalent in the 1800’s
called neurasthenia and developed a series of images based upon the
Victorian obsession with collections and the museum.
Finally medical research helped ground the project and widened my perception
of the illness in general. I visited hospitals, talked with medical
researchers, and photographed tilt tables at the RVI and an MRI scanner
at Newcastle General, gathering printouts from their research along
the way. I also collected vintage microscope slides to use as part of
a light-box display that incorporated miniature copies of the portraits
I produced earlier.
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