Lizzy Rose: Things I Have Learned The Hard Way.

About

Things I Have Learned The Hard Way’: a multi-site celebration of the life and work of Lizzy Rose (1988-2022). An exhibition takes place at four Margate venues: Crate, Limbo, Turner Contemporary and Well Projects. Alongside the exhibition, on Wednesday 12 April One Day I Will Feel My Power, a one-off event,  will take place at the ICA in London.  One Day I Will Feel My Power will show two of Lizzy’s video works alongside readings and responses from invited speakers from Leah Clements,  R A Walden, Abi Palmer, Benedict Drew, Alice Hattrick, Mary ‘Invalid Art’, Carolyn Lazard, artists who have made chronic illness, neurodivergence or disability central to their work. The event will also be streamed live and hosted online by Wysing Arts Centre. (event duration 110 mins). Sick Artists Club, inspired by the work Lizzy made while in hospital and when housebound, invites people with a chronic illness or disability to celebrate their artwork via our website and through social media.

Lizzy’s death in January 2022, following a long struggle with chronic illness, cut short an exciting, innovative  and wide-ranging career. Lizzy lived with a severe form of Crohn’s disease, a chronic autoimmune condition affecting the gut which, in Lizzy’s case, led to intestinal failure, alongside other health conditions. Her worldview was shaped by her experience and awareness of the precarity of life.  Whilst Lizzy’s later work directly and politically addressed chronic illness, and how society deals with it, from the late 2000s onwards, Lizzy’s work turned a sharp eye on  ‘hidden’ culture, asking the viewer to take notice and showing how by doing so we can affect the systems we are part of.

The exhibition at CRATE explores Lizzy’s particular affinity with whales - beings who produce highly treasured ambergris in their bowel, and whose beachings have been linked to the consumption of marine plastics. 

The photo series Whale Day documents the Pegwell stranding of 2011, when a 45 foot sperm whale became stranded and eventually died on Pegwell Bay, Thanet. The 2018 film Sick, Blue Sea, Lizzy’s final completed video work, explores nausea and environmental concerns through a tumblr blog narrated by a sick teenage sperm whale. 

Bathtub Selfie began life as an Instagram post to launch artist Abi Palmer’s book Sanatorium. Lizzy later showed the photo alongside the Instagram caption in the Turner Contemporary Open, her final exhibition prior to her death. The selfie shows Lizzy partially submerged in the bath, with flowers floating on the surface and an intravenous drip visible - a partial mirror to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-2), whilst the accompanying caption documents Lizzy’s struggles with her health, particularly the constant thirst she was unable to quench.

Also on display at CRATE, for the first time, is Lizzy’s 2015 video Feeling the Fantasy. Shown as a counterpoint to Bathtub Selfie, Feeling the Fantasy was one of the first works in which Lizzy incorporated her visibly ill body into the work. In the video, we watch Lizzy recreate a lip sync performance by the drag artist Lady Bunny in her flat dressed in a blue bubble wig and heavy drag make-up, in a nod to the online fan communities she was both fascinated by and embedded within. The exuberance of the dance routine is disrupted when, having finished the routine, Lizzy approaches the camera and removes her wig to reveal her post-chemotherapy scalp.