Body of evidence

• Main Author: Lomofsky, Lynne
• Other Authors: Payne, Malcolm
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Fine Art
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13911

Includes bibliographies. === This body of work is an experiential study which aims primarily to investigate the effect of the Western medical anatomisation of myself - the cancer patient - on and through my artmaking. The dissertation aims to contextualise my practice - to situate it somewhere between the different readings of cancer according to the Western theory of disease, the Eastern and New Age understandings of the body and ill health, and the work of other artists. It seeks balance between these competing discourses and looks for integration through them. The responses of other artists to their ill bodies are described, several of them exploiting medical technology, others subverting the language of the dominant discourse and the image of the 'good' patient with a 'bad' body. My own work attempts to make art around and out of the experience of cancer. The artmaking is an attempt to gather an understanding of my condition and to integrate art and life. The challenge is to visually represent this. I began the work with an ambivalence - was I an activist helping others, or was I merely immersed in my own struggle to maintain sanity, to reach a peace with my body, a calm space from which to deal with my condition? I have dismissed this ambivalence and settled on the latter position, which has the indirect effect of helping others. I have realized, like Jo Spence, that it is easy to burn yourself out when you work from a position of anger. Art and science have exploited and depicted the body throughout their history, sometimes in ways that overlap, sometimes at cross purposes that conflict, and sometimes in mutually supportive ways. When examining the binaries of revealing and concealing, visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, one cannot avoid a conflict with the medical system. However, through the excavation of my body by modern medical technology, I have evolved from previously seeing only the horror of a tumour to now also seeing the hidden beauty of the other landscapes inside my body. My artmaking is thus taken up as a personal issue, not attempting to shock or to be placatory, but to externalize the cancer experience and, rather than simply reacting to it, to find the beauty inside my body.