Cancer (2016-19)
At the start of my doctorate in 2015, I was invited to be part of a project on head and neck cancer. Somehow I had found myself into the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta. I had finished my MFA a few years before, and, to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing there. I didn't know if I was going to become a health researcher and leave the whole art thing behind. I didn't know if I knew enough to do that, or even if that is what I wanted from life. I didn't know much, but I sensed everything was straight ahead.
In October, I found myself in a room with head and neck cancer patients, artists, researchers, and clinicians, all about to participate in a two-day arts-based workshop looking at the lived experience of head and neck cancer. I knew nothing about head and neck cancer, or anything about cancer, other than that is what my grandma died from and how I felt my body obsessively for tumours. It was a terribly uncomfortable time but over the next two years, I learnt quite a bit about co-creation. About democratizing the creative process and including people who don't normally get a voice. That we all had a story to tell. That we all are storytellers.
In 2016, I recorded a group of patients and developed a new technique for video. It took months, but, frame by frame, I cut out their portraits, like the doctors had cut up their faces and bodies, and I made these videos. I was thinking about the physicality of their faces and surgeries. I was thinking about their dizzying diagnosis. I was thinking about their fragmented identities of living-with-cancer. I felt a great many things I didn't yet understand.
In 2019, I was asked by Dr. Brian Stonehocker if we could make a portrait together. Portrait of a Man was from our first exploration in July. It was vulnerable. It was serious. It was a carnival. In October, we did another shoot, a week after his mother died of cancer. Of Mom was a profound experience to witness. One that I keep sensing over and over again in my mind and body.