Self Portrait
Exploring movement, romance and a mix of soft key lights and inky-dink pings.
Artist’s Statement
Garnish (2024)
“Once I could stand and work, I found myself fascinated less by the personal experience of my pain as by just how at odds that experience sat to the almost psychotic complacency of my incredible surgeons.
In the bottom left bowl of this imagined surgical martini station yes, that is the top of my left femur as removed during my hip resurfacing and stored in our home freezer. I wasn’t expecting the neat little drill hole, or the residual gore still attached, or the discombobulating feeling that this thing really should still be inside my body.
The everyday disquietude of surgery and its fallout really is both horrific and spectacular.”
Post-Op (2024)
“One of my surgeons came to visit me after surgery to let me know that everything had gone according to plan. I was just coming around, the clock showing a little after 4pm, and I remember the palpable exhaustion he held in his body. The intense physicality of the surgical process hadn’t resonated in my body yet – but I could see it in him.
This post-operative tray, then, is as much for my surgeons as for me: The putting on of his/my watch sees a return to everyday life; the scalpel blade is laid down, uncomfortably gleaming once more; the whisky promises a warm reprieve; the anonymous pill a numbing embrace.”
Viscera (2024)
“Knowing that two grown men reached deep inside my body through a foot-long incision of flowing blood and unyielding muscle to yank and hammer and saw at my skeleton has been fascinatingly unsettling and unsettlingly fascinating.
I imagine myself a ruby red balloon filled with a gelatinous sea of gore and an unruly army of hard marbles and more wet-filled balloons. My insides are no longer an organisational abstract; the clean and compartmentalised illustrations from school books and NHS pamphlets. Everything in its right place. Just so.
No, this is me coming to terms with my internal messiness. I am a sentient sack of stick bones and free-flowing viscera.”
Extraction (2024)
“Welcome to your Five Star Surgical Experience. Whether we’re putting bits inside your fragile mortal frame or taking them out, you can rest assured that we will do so with the utmost professionalism, pride and style.
I spoke with someone before my surgery who said that, after his private hip replacement, he could have ordered filet mignon three times a day had he wanted, and that he was drinking lattes straight after coming around.
I’m sufficiently working class British that I’m in awe of the NHS daily and have an institutional distrust for privatised anything, including healthcare.
But it got me imagining how a truly luxurious 5* surgical process might look and more importantly feel: A boutique hotel with a surgical theatre and a renowned mixologist on hand? Or perhaps something a little fetishistic?