Humanscape : Image-Metaphor-Narrative: A Collaboration in Hemato-Oncology

My work explores interdisciplinary links between art, science and narrative from the position of an enthusiasm for the "phenomenal body," i.e. the body's emotional relationship to the "thingness" of the world. As an artist, I use photography, digital imagery and text to extend and combine the languages of these disciplines in unorthodox ways. Working across these disciplines, I value metaphor as a carrier of meaning. I also utilize slippage and juxtaposition as further elements in the visual and textual narratives that I construct [1]. These metaphoric narratives (or cross-wirings) may be seen to connect various phenomena of perceptual experience by recognizing and combining the experience of the senses through a series of visual and linguistic layers of meaning. As Vilayanur S. Ramachandran said recently in discussing the brain's metaphor-making relationship to synesthesia, "there is a pre-existing translation between the visual appearance of the object represented in the fusiform gyrus [of the brain] and the auditory representation in the auditory cortex" [2].

I have found that the process of working with digital imaging and electronic software creates an analogous language structure with which I can synesthetically place the component parts of these cross-wirings together and create from them a seamless metaphoric (narrative) whole.

In my discussions with Ghulam J. Mufti, consultant in haemato-oncology at Kings College Hospital, London, we discovered that we had a mutual interest in metaphor. As a result of these discussions, humanscape, an art-based project in hemato-oncology, began in 1999.

Our objective has been to create a physical space and means of expression for what is an under-explored area of personal and social experience: the subtle nature of a serious illness, its impact upon the individual and his or her interaction with a highly efficient medical environment during the progression and treatment of the disease. The languages of a large metropolitan teaching hospital are culturally diverse and clinically specialized. Such an institution operates and communicates via complex information systems. While there is an opportunity for "cross-wiring," the patient is often unaware of it, and specialists tend to focus upon and operate within their own fields. Working between the individual's experience of leukemia and the specialist languages and technology involved in blood cancer care, we explored alternative forms of dialogue and meaning in the experience and treatment of leukemia.

Leukemia exists at a genetic level in the bone marrow. Blood tests expose it, and cytogenetics define the "type." In the aberrant genetic combinations found in the disease, the language of biochemical information breaks down. Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), for example, results from an inversion of chromosome 16. The destruction of the patient's bone marrow by chemotherapy, followed by marrow transplant, is a typical treatment for the disease. In isolation following transplant, patients sought familiar and reassuring visual models as antidotes to the destructive procedure of chemotherapy with its resulting altered body image and neutropenia (loss of the immune function). The patients' body/mind shifts and alterations to normal perspectives and perceptions of identity, often a result of drugs and the physiological stress of the treatment, were the least easily discussed aspects of this serious illness.

All experience requires a container. Language is the normal container, but in extreme circumstances, language fails. Metaphor, with its subtle relationship to "thingness" and its ability to layer meaning, became an especially useful container when I was working with patients and staff to construct a convincing account of the realities of the disease. I sought to develop appropriate metaphors for the experience, some of which patients discovered on their own through their artworks, journals and diaries, and others of which were worked on in collaboration with me.

Parts of the project involved interactive elements with staff and patients, as when they were invited to draw and write directly on prepared walls in the hematology ward. In the visual outcomes, patients utilized metaphor as both amplification and articulation of their experience and as recurring positive and negative motifs in their treatment. I extended this work by combining and realigning conversations, diaries, clinical practice, specialist texts, photographic documentary...