Helena Holden BA (Hons) Fine Art and Art History
Creating art has always been a passion and a struggle. However, I aim for my practice to be disability positive, accessible and emotive to telling the narrative of chronic illness in its many forms.
Whenever I experience a severe Fibromyalgia flare up my body suffers. More than that, my ability to verbally translate physical sensation is relinquished, relocated to a trapping web of unfathomable nonsense where it has no hope of escape. Creating
The dialogue of chronic illness and what it means to be having a ‘good’ day vs. a ‘bad’ day is one that I have only found to be truly understood by someone also living with chronic illness. It is a complex language, like Russian to someone who can’t read Cyrillic. The only way you can have understanding and communicate as such is through years of experience and exposure. Learning a language, you might take a holiday or even live in the country a while; all in the name of exposure; No matter what you do, there is a wealth of information accessible to all demographical backgrounds.
The dialogue of chronic illness has no guidebook. No textbooks. No tutors. No online courses to shed insight. I am excited by the possibilities of opening a two-way channel of informative expression between our world and The World. The prospect excites and terrifies me.
Although my ideas come from my personal experience, they are not autobiographical in nature. Disabled experience of the world can be unpredictable and disjointed. Hidden in plain sight to the abled eye, each day erects a new set of obstacles.
Problem solving and solution seeking is the feather duster to my entangled web.
