Pretty Sick: Searching for Beauty in the Context of Critical Illness by Nancy A. Nichols
When I applied to the MFA program at New England College I had a small handmade photobook that I had made of images that I took as my son battled childhood leukemia. And while I knew I wanted to put those memories away, I really wanted to turn them into something beautiful before I shelved them. I wanted to use my photography to transform them.
A professional writer, I had spent some time rewriting and reimagining the stories of my own cancer and my son’s in a new narrative that I could turn into something beautiful. I use my art, both my photography and my writing, to take the ugly events of the past and make them beautiful—or at the very least meaningful.
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images,” says the writer Joan Didion. “By the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Organizing these photos into a portfolio has been about giving voice to the sometimes confusing, often inchoate experience of illness and loss. I crave both narrative coherence and closure. Art, for me, is a meaning making memory changing machine. And that is a central theme in both my writing and my photo work.
Moreover, I seek beauty. Using images and biological representations of my own cancer and those that have afflicted my family, my work seeks to deconstruct and reimagine the experience of illness. Removing it from the confines of ill-lit and ugly hospital rooms and taking it to the garden using simple imagery of flowers, leaves and forests.
Nancy A. Nichols lives and works in Massachusetts.
To view more of Nancy A. Nichols’s work visit her website.
