Below I show two medical scans.

If, you are a medical professional, you might look at these and take lots of meaning from these two images. If, however, like me, you are not a medical professional, what do these images mean?

 

Might an audience be cold or disinterested? What then, if I start to build a context for these images? These images show the inside of a pelvis and the other inside a head. Maybe that is obvious, I don’t know. Is the audience still uninterested? In each there is a tumour. Is that obvious or does the audience look again, their interest pricked? What if I reveal that I am not just a disinterested non-medical person but the parent of the children in those images. I could describe in detail the impact on the child and on the family. I could build a picture and a story. I could explain the pain and the tears. The sense of the unknown, the terror and the regret of hoping or wishing for something different, whether detection of tumour had happened sooner or saying aloud, “Why? Why did this happen to us?” I could explain some of the medical science, the name of the cancer and possible outcomes, then the treatments. If I then moved forwards in time, I could explain the outcome, the lack of response, the surgery, the chemo and radio therapy. At this stage has the audience reached peak interest and have started to push back? It is too much? They don’t want to know. If I talk of the death of a child represented by one of these scans or if I show a photograph of that child in life, am I speaking to the back of my audience who is already walking away?

I have spent a long time worrying about this. Is my project too tough? Too emotionally challenging? If reviewing my emotional journey is tough for me who been dealing with this for many years, what would it be like for someone at random off the street?

How much should I build my art and present it as I want and take the audience out of the equation? If it too tough or painful then is that my problem? No but, is showing medical scan images and the image of a child far too literal? Beyond that am I abusing my children and the memory of my daughter who died? Am I taking advantage?

There must be indirect and less obvious ways of thinking and cancer and death. Is this how I should progress with this project?

This photograph shows a hospital corridor and when I took it, expressed my sense of being lost, wandering corridors, walking slowly, looping the hospital, yet still having the desire to take pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember when my daughter knew she was dying and in the Sick Kids hospital in Edinburgh in her room. She paused speaking to me for a moment. The door to her room closed and she lay back in the silence and lay still for a moment. She then looked up and announced that boy next door must have died as she had heard his body being taken away. She had been in that cancer ward long enough that something of the atmosphere and routine of the place and her awareness was operating on her at a deeper level than I was aware of. She was dying and was surrounded by death.  I remember the Oncologist telling me that they had lost six children. In a week.  The whole area of childhood cancer and death is brutal. I can’t change that. What I can change is how I think about it and how I create and present my art. Is my job to try and express this brutality or will this crush me? This post is an attempt to understand myself and to speak some painful thoughts out loud. In my own experience, hospital is a place where time runs slowly and where there is too much time to think. I wonder if this self of slow time is true for those who will die soon or if their time runs far far too quickly?

This idea is something I will return to as it isn’t an easy thing for me to resolve.