What do you, we, I see?

2022

In 2022 I collaborated with Dr Sarah Yardley, THIS Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, on producing a series of images that relate to her research project that explores and challenges the accepted norms in healthcare systems, using Palliative Care and Mental Healthcare as two examples. Sarah’s research aims to communicate what matters most in the lived experiences of service users, carers, specialist and generalist healthcare professionals as they negotiate in practice the work of relationships and engage in hidden human efforts to mitigate inadequate attention to people in healthcare system design.

Care has been an important theme throughout my life and work. As a young person I often cared for my mentally unwell mother, and vice versa as I grew older with my own difficulties. For two decades we delicately oscillated between the carer and the cared for and its associated challenges. I am fascinated by the caring roles that we explore in our relationships, the complexity of difference in what it means to be cared for individuals, and how systems can foster or prohibit caring environments. What happens when people are treated as systems? Who fits into these systems and who is left outside? How can medical professionals work with patients in an individualised way whilst within the confines of rigid healthcare systems?

Responding to the key themes in Sarah’s research this abstract series of images explores the necessity for fluidity within systems of care, reflecting on themes of synchronicity, fragility and impermanence.

Watch a short film below about the project, made by Wex as part of my role as an Wex Ambassador. Read about this project over on my reflective practice journal.

Commissioned by:

Dr Sarah Yardley, with funding from Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust

Thank you:

Thank you to James Cooper and Frances Reed for their sound / equipment support.