From trauma comes beauty, from sharing comes connection, from connection comes understanding. The colours of my body, extracting the elements to make a mark with artistic intention, chosen colours from photographs of my drains, wounds and tubes.

In 2022 I had surgery during which my bowel perforated and I developed sepsis. I woke up days later in Intensive Care Unit from a medically induced coma. I was unable to speak, I had a breathing tube and wires, equipment and medication performing every single bodily function. I was bed bound, had six drains in my abdomen, an ileostomy, a catheter, a nasogastric tube, breathing tubes, PICC line into my heart, central lines in my neck, arterial lines in my wrists and several other cannulas and tubes. But I was alive.
This life changing experience has affected every part of my life including my art practice, physically limiting me on being able to get out of bed, let alone to an art studio and mentally and emotionally limiting my abilities to focus on anything other than survival. And yet, my art was always there. Even in the darkest of times I was using my practice and my creativity to make sense of what was happening to me and giving me an outlet to explain the unspeakable feelings to those around me. Through photography, audio recordings, note writing, documenting the amazing array of colours that came out of my body. Using art as therapy.
The images of myself in the Intensive Care Unit are distressing, they are graphic, visceral and upsetting. I questioned how I would be able to use this experience that will shape my life in my art. The vulnerable images have a great amount of power, but they are intensely personal.
The colours taken from the images of my body became the Samtones project, it allows me to reduce and simplify a traumatic experience in a way that allows conversation to occur without the gore of the visceral.
From trauma comes beauty, from sharing comes connection, from connection comes understanding.












