City Lit: This Delightful Woman

About

Exhibition Dates:  Wednesday 28th February-Sunday 17th March, City Lit Gallery

Artist Talk & Poetry Reading:  ‘This Delightful Woman’– Friday 8th March, 18:30-20:30,

City Lit (including the book launch of ‘This Delightful Woman’) 

Susannah Goulding’s visceral, poignant and prolific artistic practice explores and expresses her ongoing experience of living with cancer.  With honesty and authenticity, she aims to re-address the language of cancer by opening new, personal, and questioning visual and textual dialogue that expresses authentic lived experience. She works directly with medical imagery, creative records of her hospital treatments, and the emotional, psychological, and embodied experience.

“I explore both the experience of a liminal space, between the disease, its pathology and its treatment.”

The title ‘This Delightful Woman’ directly references the term of address used within the first letter from the artist’s oncologist notifying her of her diagnosis with breast cancer and frames the exhibition in relation to Susannah’s interests in the language and dialogue around those living with significant ill health.  

Susannah’s powerful imagery and sensitive explorations across a range of media give voice and presence to the human experience of medical care, harnessing creative work to empower in a situation where those undergoing treatment may feel like a passive recipient of diagnoses and medical interventions.  

“My artistic practice is now part of my life, the hospital and art studio work in harmony with each other, where making and the medical merge”.

In bringing aesthetic expression and form to the often-unseen internal experience of cancer, audiences are invited to engage, reflect on, feel and contribute to dialogue around a disease that touches the lives of everybody at some point in their life.  

Whilst the work presented is both conceptual and expressive, it equally operates on a political level – contributing to debates and necessary changes in medical care where the patient’s voice and humanity is heard and acknowledged in the context of their treatment, alongside acknowledgement of the painful realities of the disease. 

Whilst recognising the necessity of hope for those living with illness, the artist refers to the experience of ‘pink-washing’ in the public language and representation of women’s experiences of breast cancer which she sees as a discomforting silence around cancer’s reality where those receiving treatment lack choice around confronting the far from ‘delightful’ aspects of their lived experience. 

Follow Susannah and her work on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/susannahgoulding/​