KATYA ROBIN

I am presenting a selection of works made in response to my lived experience. My work is a form of embedded social reportage of contemporary life from my perspective as a person with complex health issues.

While waiting for medical appointments I occupied myself by making sketches. This evolved into a series of constructed images depicting domestic staff, cleaning products, and other scenes epitomising ennui in institutionalised environments. These works are both documentary and metaphorical, the artistic act of making marks as an inverse parallel to cleaning and stain-removal. I imagined my in-patient stay during the pandemic as an artist’s residency. Afterwards, using immersive embodied recall, I made images about my experience of chronic and critical illness, as both patient and observer. It was a way to speak of this time on quarantined hospital wards, enduring overwhelming hallucinations, and reclaiming identity after major surgery. The series of red watercolours are made with a limited palette based on the Four Humors. They relate to my experience of cardiac infection, open heart surgery, receiving blood transfusions, and living with a blood disorder.