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Juliet Chenery-Robson

County Durham
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Juliet Chenery-Robson is a visual artist and academic researcher with a strong interest in exploring the terrain that juxtaposes the visual arts and medical science. In 2015 she completed an AHRC funded, practice-led Photography PhD that focused on the visual representation of the invisible illness ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). Adopting a participatory action research methodology, Juliet worked with ME sufferers to create visual and textual portrayals of sufferers’ illness experience. Since completing her PhD she has secured research and development funding, via EngageFMS (Patient & Public Engagement & Involvement), to explore the visualisation of chronic illness as part of an arts and medical science collaboration with Newcastle University’s Medical and Creative Arts departments. She is also honorary treasurer for the Royal Photographic Society’s Medical Imaging Group and a trustee for the charity ME North East.

Background to ME research: The chronically ill ME sufferer experiences invisibility on four interlinked fronts: physical, social, medical, and political invisibility. The main aim of the project was therefore to create work, in participation with ME sufferers, that could be used as a tool to raise awareness of ME’s invisibility and communicate an understanding of ME to public, art, and medical audiences. By exploring the many layers that constitute ME and by incorporating the personal view of ME sufferers—through a combination of photography, text, audio, SenseCam, family album photographs, and Google Earth images—the research tested different methods of using metaphor to visually represent ME’s invisibility. It has also helped provide ME sufferers with a ‘voice’ by which to communicate the many problems they face as they try to cope with a life that is disabled by ME.

 

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