“I’m not an artist, but I wanted to be able to describe my pain through photography,” says Clare, who has secondary breast cancer. “I can see why it’s been extremely difficult to get the right pain relief because there is no language for it.”
Pain is invisible—frequently misunderstood, uniquely experienced and difficult to verbalise. Even healthcare professionals struggle to grasp its true impact, as reducing pain to a numerical scale fails to capture how it fractures daily life, relationships and identity. My project makes pain visible through artistic expression, revealing personal realities that clinical assessments struggle to access.
Since 2023, I have collaborated with individuals living with chronic pain, the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, and the Chronic Pain Neurotechnology Network. I listen empathetically to understand each person’s unique truth before offering creative processes that help them express their pain authentically. Visual themes are tailored to each person’s personal circumstances.
Through photography, writing, mark-making and storytelling, the collaborative creative process becomes both therapeutic and clarifying. Participants find ways to express what was previously trapped within their bodies. At its heart, this work addresses a basic human need: to be seen, understood and believed.
The Process
Most of the five participants aren’t artists or creatives, yet all are interested in exploring how pain can be expressed and understood differently through creativity. Only one of the participants, Donna, identifies as an artist; she talks about her work as a ‘way to breathe’.
I see these relationships as collaborative partnerships. My role is to find ways to output their voices authentically and creatively– facilitating processes where we co-create together, or where I translate their experiences into visual language.
Giving people encouragement and freedom to express their pain creatively opens new ways for them to articulate those experiences, in turn offering spaces for contemplation. Throughout the collaborative process, we reflect on how making art becomes therapeutic, or cathartic – it is a way to give voice to what they are undergoing both mentally and physically. The people I am working with in this project want to be heard – they seek to translate what is happening within their bodies to others, and they wish for their experiences to be validated.
Working 1:1 with each person allows me to respond to their individual situation. The content and feel of what we create vary greatly, spanning across multiple media. What results are authentic and often unexpected outcomes that merge expressive and documentary forms of communication.
Each person has built unique systems of care around them, which I use as a starting point for our work together.
We begin with multiple conversations and face-to-face meetings where I sensitively engage with where they are in that moment. Through empathic listening, I work to understand their feelings and thoughts about pain. I ask, ‘What do you want people to understand about you and your pain?’ This opens a conversation about each person’s unique experience.
After hearing their ideas, I offer creative processes and examples of how we could explore what they want to convey about their situation. We look at other art and photographic works to discover what resonates with them as a means to articulate their individual lived experiences of pain. Looking and listening together, we find a visual theme that works specifically for them.
For Clare, we focus on the significance of her garden. Donna’s mark-making physically acts out and expresses her pain, combining with my portraits of her, which she worked into. Jake expresses himself through a self-care letter, playlists and colour to convey his pain, varied emotions, energy levels and the feeling of leading two lives. Jemima’s focus is on her commitment to her school work and sports. Ellen’s work is sketchbook-like; we made images together, printed them, and she annotated them. Playing with different outputs, she also used her own Instax camera, which she loved using as part of the process.
What I found so interesting is that each person’s pain is constantly evolving and changing; both their understanding of it and mine progressed throughout this collaboration.