A post on why I’ve been neglecting my blog.
My Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) has progressed to the point where some of my flares require long hospitalizations, more IV antibiotics, and ERCPs. I’ve been much sicker for much longer, and sometimes I don’t even have the focus to do much embroidery.
A few months ago Lorraine Boissoneault contacted me about teaching a workshop together. I was only a little familiar with her work but I had heard good things about her upcoming book, Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness—out now!—and was intrigued by what she had in mind. We connected over our invisible illnesses and how our creative work has helped us share what others can’t see.
Lorraine also wrote a very complimentary post about me here with more information on the workshop and statistics about invisible illness: Disabled Sci-Art
I hope you’ll join us for this short and hopefully helpful workshop next week.
Seeing Symptoms: An Art and Poetry Workshop
Join artist Lia Pas and writer Lorraine Boissoneault for an hourlong workshop exploring the ways we can use art to make invisible illnesses more visible. The session will be virtual and free. It will be held on Zoom on Thursday May 28 at 12pmPST/1pmMST/2pmCST/3pmEST. A backup date (in case of illness) will be Tuesday June 16.
Participants will need pen/pencils and paper, anatomical printouts (which can be found for free on Wikimedia by searching “Gray’s Anatomy”), and any other art materials they’d like to work with. Lia will demonstrate her symptomatology embroidery and then lead participants in a guided meditation and drawing technique to help visualize symptoms. Lorraine will share a poetry exercise for generating new ways of describing the experience of fatigue, pain, and other aspects of chronic illness. Participants will come away with new techniques for exploring their illnesses and ideas for how to translate them into descriptions to share with medical providers, as well as an increased sense of bodily autonomy.
This event will be hosted in partnership with Chicago-based queer and Covid cautious organization Parallel Play. We chose the month of May in recognition of ME Awareness month, but will be talking about other invisible illnesses as well. To register, please follow this link. You can find our access guide there.
I’ve participated in SciArt September for a few years and this is year five! Liz Butler and Lucy Gem came up with some excellent prompts. The main theme is Conservation with each week on a different theme: lands, species, water, people, and a shared future. Most of my artwork is anatomy-based so I’ll be playing with the themes, but I have a number of ecological-themed poems so there will be more poetry in what I share this year.
Late in 2024, Kathryn Vercillo of Threadstack and Create Me Free sent me some intriguing interview questions which I used as journaling prompts between liver infections. The interview is now online for all to read. In it I share the experience of changing mediums due to health, beginning to identify as having a disability, reading The Van Gogh Blues, and so much more.
I’m very honoured to have two pieces included in this year’s Opulent Mobility show! Opulent Mobility is an international annual exhibit that asks artists to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. It imagines a world where disability is celebrated instead of denied, ignored, and feared. These exhibits are curated by founder A. Laura Brody and disability arts activist and photographer Anthony Tusler and include art and artworks from across the country and around the globe.
I completed my largest embroidery to date—the wandering ghost—in June. The stitched area is 53 x 21 cm (21 x 8.5 inches).
Clean up took a lot more time than usual because the chalk pencil I used was especially stubborn to wash out of the cotton and I wanted to wet block instead of iron it which took a bit of figuring out since that’s a new process for me. But it is done! Aside from cleanup I worked on it from June 14, 2023 to June 12, 2024. An entire year.
Read on for more about my process for this piece.
Continue readingI’ve been participating in SciArt September for a few years now. Glendon Mellow and Liz Butler came up with some excellent prompts yet again this year, each week on a different theme: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, folklore, and the end. I shared older work based on all the daily prompts.
My interview on the Arts Ably podcast is up! Diane and I talked about how my artistic practices in music, writing, and embroidery shift with my ME/CFS and disability.
A couple months ago I had the honour of being interviewed by Daniel Moore for the podcast Post-Exertional Mayonnaise. The name of the podcast is a play on Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM), the hallmark symptom of ME/CFS.
Daniel and I had a wide-ranging discussion and talked about whether its possible to flourish whilst living with ME, making art with a disability, flow states, symptomatology, meditation, and Stoicism.
You can also listen on your favourite podcast platform via the PEM Podcast webpage.
Note: This has been cross-posted on my ko-fi. There are a few other monthly updates there if you would like to read back a few months.
Webinar Report
Another monthly-ish update and another very full month. The main creative work on my plate was teaching a webinar for CHASE Medical Humanities about the visualization process I use to create my symptomatology pieces as well as how to use the poetic technique of homophonic translation to re-vision and re-own dense scientific texts.
It felt good to stretch my teaching muscles again. I’ve been teaching in some capacity since my late teens—music, yoga, and meditation—but had to stop when I got sick in 2015. Despite an ME/CFS crash the day before, I was well enough to present my webinar and the participants seemed to enjoy and get a lot out of the work. A few people even shared their symptomatology image/test pieces on social media. Here are a few:
Gillian Blekkenhorst started with a trachea and expanded their piece from there.
website: https://blekkenhorst.ca/
Twitter: @gblekkenhorst