Finding the Beauty in illness
Roughly 8 months ago Lottie approached me saying she had a project she would like to work with me on. We sat down together and she took me through her scrapbook/journal and explained how she was struggling to find positive imagery around cancer that she could relate to.
There are plenty of images showing people looking miserable and very sick. One of the more popular art pieces shows a before and after of women going through breast cancer. The women are denied makeup during the shoot and are lit in unflattering ways that emphasize how sick they are. We found ourselves talking over this and ended up asking the question, why can’t someone going through chemotherapy be on the cover of Voge?
“Why can’t someone who is going through chemotherapy be on the cover of Voge? ”
Lottie herself had just been diagnosed with cancer for the second time and was about to undergo chemotherapy and then have a mastectomy, she also works in arts and health, and so this was clearly a subject very close to her heart.
We went over what she wanted to get from this project and what she wanted to achieve. We sat and brainstormed about how we thought best to tackle the project. In the end, we settled on doing a series of fashion shoots with her as she went through treatment each one would follow a theme that would emerge as she went through her journey.
We decided that this was going to be a big project to undertake and we needed to enlist some help from a few creative friends and so The Radiate Collective was born. I called upon some friends and some creatives whose work I admired and asked them all to meet us for a chat and go over the initial idea.
Our team consisted of: Tyler Ayres, Tünde Nemeth, Joni Free, Lu Porritt and Masie Bisson
We knew early on that we had lots of big ideas and would need to secure some funding to make this happen so we needed to demonstrate what we could do with no budget in order to get people excited about what we could do. Our initial shoot was quite stripped back and simplistic, but it was all hands on deck with everyone making lots of favors happen to get it to work. We borrowed dresses that had been displayed at the V&A and had lots of plants donated by Tiger Lilly and a hand-crafted headpiece made. We also had a nurse come down to the studio to undress the medical line so we could have it on display during the shoot.
The idea for this shoot was to create images that showed the words “grace” “acceptance” and “going with the flow”. So Joni selected some floaty dresses and elegant gowns that would help give us some nice secondary motion in the images and dynamic shapes. we chose poses that were open and accepting and we also let Lottie improvise some dance and play in front of the camera to try and capture some of the feel of going with the flow.
It became obvious quite quickly that there was a very important balance between showing the sickness and showing the person themselves. The idea for the headdress was not to hide Lottie’s bald head but to help take focus away from the lack of hair and make the images about her as a person and hopefully the elements of her sickness would become secondary.
After submitting our initial images, we managed to secure arts funding in order to finish the project. We then got to work on the second shoot.
This was done soon after Lottie had her medical line removed and was just about starting to grow her hair back. One of the things she found comforting during her treatment was that she had learned that one of the chemotherapy drugs she was taking was derived from a yew tree, which made it seem less scary to her.
So our next shoot was based on the theme of Nature and its healing properties. Tünde (AKA Tiger Lilly) filled the studio with a crazy amount of plants all of which had links to medicine and healing. Surrounding Lottie in a womb/cocoon-like structure of nature hinting at the idea of rebirth. She is reluctantly being handed the yew tree in one of the images to help further link her treatment to the imagery.
Tünde also arranged the flowers around Lottie’s head in a way that could suggest the soft gentle plants were taking away/replacing her hair.
Our next shoot took place soon after Lottie had had her mastectomy and was recovered enough to be in the studio with us. We themed this shoot around finding moments of joy, which is something Lottie was trying to do throughout her treatment.
We settled on a “Disco” theme for the shoot with lots of glitter and sparkles and balloons as this was one of Lottie’s favorite things to do. We also brought in some help from Chloe Ferguson at Guernsey Bubbles who filled the studio with some crazy bubbles and who can’t help but turn into a big kid when there are lots of bubbles around?!
For the final set of images that would make it into the book/show, we carefully selected the images that showed hints of her mastectomy dressings so as to make sure the illness wasn’t hidden but then also it wasn’t the main focus of the images. This balance was key for us throughout the project.
We left a lot of images on the cutting room floor. It was easy to show moments of joy and fun, but the subject matter is very sensitive, and we felt showing a happy cancer patient playing around and having fun could easily be misinterpreted and seem insensitive. Striking the balance between Joy and the medical aspect was really quite tricky.
The penultimate shoot was quite soon after.
Some of the themes we discussed that Lottie felt important to talk about within the project were self-care, compassion, and convalescence.
She noted that having to return to work after a quite traumatic event was quite overwhelming and that having time to recover mentally as well as physically was very important.
At this point, Lottie was thankfully becoming less visibly ill, so it was important to us that we showed within the images some of the elements of aftercare that are most common for people receiving breast cancer treatment.
The initial idea was to try and turn a “bed day” into a fashion shoot. We constructed an entire bedroom scene within the studio so that we could feature objects such as a post-mastectomy surgery pillow, (provided for free by charities to aid recovery from surgery) Queasy dops (used to prevent nausea) Wig, and various pills and medicines.
We also wanted to try and turn the bed itself into an object of fashion, Making the idea of convalescence a desirable fashion statement.
We were kindly allowed to borrow bed sheets from La Grande Mare Hotel before it was demolished, so we loaded as many as we could fit in a van and constructed some kind of mix between a dress and an installation from bed sheets and pillows in the studio.
The last in the series of shoots was a really tough one to get right. The subject was about Lottie owning her own narrative.
This was something that had come up a few times, and something we had repeatedly tried to allude to throughout the project. It was important to be able to represent Lottie in the way she wanted to be seen, not just as a ‘sick person’ but as a person who happens to be sick.
We had a couple of attempts to tackle this shoot as we really struggled to work out exactly how to show this concept visually. Eventually, we settled on using pages from her diary as the medium, creating a paper dress that felt powerful yet delicate. This took a whole day of folding and construction with roughly 500 sheets of paper.
The first image shows Lottie as seen by others, looking small and “weak” surrounded by the narrative.
The other images are of her in the dress, in a powerful pose, taking control of the narrative.
We brought in a dance instructor to help with constructing the poses
The final project was on display at the George Crossan Gallery from May 27th - June 9th 2022 and can be found in full over at theradiatecollective.com
