‘Art is for everyone and if you’re chronically ill, art is everything’
-Mellissa Monsoon
Danielle Radway and Mellissa Monsoon share their journey of what it is like to live with chronic health conditions.
In 2018 Monsoon was diagnosed with Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH), a brain condition with no known cause or cure. Radway was diagnosed with Chiari Malformation 1 and Syringomyelia in 2008 and later diagnosed with Acromegaly in 2015.
The exhibition will explore what it is like for women living with illnesses in the healthcare system and how art can help visualise invisible symptoms. Both artists will share their diagnostic journeys and show how art has helped them process these life changes to be able to spread awareness.
Artworks include interactive art, illustration, printmaking, body casts, ceramics, photography, painting, video and sculpture.
There are so many sides to chronic illnesses. You have to learn patience and acceptance but most importantly making sure you are able to take good moments with the not so good, find your joy and keep your sparkle.
Free Drop-in Workshop:
With Resilience Comes Growth
Saturday 13th April : 11am - 2pm
Pie Factory Margate, CT9 1EW
​
As part of their exhibition Resilience local artist Mellissa Monsoon and Birmingham artist Danielle Radway invite you to join their community sculpture, participants can drop by the exhibition space and add their element to the sculpture.
​
Both Monsoon and Radway’s practices focus on how art can provide a way to visualise feelings and invisible symptoms, transforming them into works of art. This workshop will empower participants to do the same.
Taking the form of a tree, the sculpture can be decorated, transformed, painted, adorned and personalised by participants to represent moments of struggle, resilience, change and growth.
This is a drop-in workshop. Join us any time from 11:00 - 14:00. You don't need to bring anything: all materials and equipment will be provided. But, if you would like to bring something you’ve already made to add to the sculpture, that’s fine too!
Free Workshop:
Beer Can Votives - Symptomancy:
A workshop Exploring Symptoms
Sunday 14th April : 2pm - 4pm
Pie Factory Margate, CT9 1EW
​
This workshop is open to everyone and may be of particular interest to those with incapacitating or distracting sensations!
​
As part of the exhibition Resilience at Pie Factory Margate, join artist and metalsmith Billie M Vigne in a free, two-hour workshop to make an embossed Beer Can Votive offering that speaks of your own symptoms.
Our symptoms choreograph our orientation within the world, they are our own knowledge and somatic experience. Yet votive offerings throughout history are overwhelmingly made to higher, governing powers in the hope of curing bodily ailments.
Chronic illnesses are often not understood by science yet held aggressively hostage to it, so what happens if we offer these votives at the altars of our own myth building and worship there in glee and anarchy? Or treat them as the divination tool they really are and conduct some symptomancy?
Bring your sensations, bring your stories, bring your strife and make an offering to Resilience.
The Beer Can Votive project is run by Billie M Vigne. It uses the technique of embossing on discarded drinks cans to nurture personal mythologies and create lightweight metal reliefs that can be kept or given away.
​
Tools and materials will be provided.
More about Billie:
