Julie Light Art: Imagining Disease and Health

As an artist who spends time exploring how we use our imagination to understand our bodily experience of health and disease, the opportunity to be involved in a project that focuses on heartbreak as an embodied experience is very exciting.

I started working in glass after a previous unrelated career, and as soon as I began making artwork, I was inspired to create pieces about health, illness and physiology. As my practice developed, I became more and more interested in how we imagine the interior workings of our bodies and whether that has an impact on how we experience our lives from other perspectives.

Early on I developed a small series of work I called Imaging Inside, which was based on the visuals we are exposed to from medical imaging technologies, such as X-Rays, MRIs and Scanning Electron Microscope images.

Julie Light, *Breathless* (2015), Image: Julie Light

As my interest in this area developed, I went on to study for an MA in Art & Science at Central St Martins, where my research focused on the portrayal of cancers and their visual representations in the media. It left me pondering how the images we see affect how we feel about the illnesses we experience. It was also at CSM that I met Jill Mueller and, finding we had many shared interests and approaches to our art, we have been collaborating on projects together ever since.

Julie Light, *Blood Morphology Series* (2017), Image: Robyn Manning

Since that time, I have continued to develop my interest in how we imagine disease and health, collaborating with patients and scientists to reflect on how we visualise what’s happening in our bodies and creating artwork about cancer research and treatment, for example with researchers at the University of Leeds and for AstraZeneca, UK, as well as undertaking an artist residency at the London Cancer Hub.

Julie Light, *The Mites* (2022), Image: Robyn Manning

More recently I turned my attention to where human and creature health are entwined, working with ocean scientists to explore the lost medical potential of marine invertebrates, and making whimsical pieces based on the idea of massively enlarged house mites. I have also branched out, making artwork about other embodied experiences such as memory and insomnia.