Lizzy Rose is an artist exploring hidden communities and the politics of her glitchy body.
Lizzy Rose (b. 1988) is based in Margate in Kent. She has the autoimmune condition Crohns disease and intestinal failure. Over the past year she has been exploring how to use her experience of illness to make work. The video work Sick, blue sea, shown in the final show Gut Feelings in December 2018, was the culmination of several ideas Lizzy Rose explored throughout her year as an Associate at Open School East. The work follows a fictional narrative spoken by a teenage sperm whale blogging about her chronic nausea. The work links several of Lizzy’s key interests: chronic illness communities online and the culture surrounding them, narrative storytelling, and humour.
Lizzy Rose was an Associate at Open School East in 2018 and has been part of the Crate programming team since 2016. Previously she was Assistant Curator at LIMBO working with artists Matthew de Pulford and Paul Hazelton. In 2019, Rose will spend the majority of the year in hospital but plans to continue working from her hospital bed.
Sick, blue sea
HD Video / 10:32 min / 2018
The film follows a fictional narrative based on real life stories of sperm whale standings. The author Philip Hoare has theorised that some standings are caused by whales swallowing plastic, which eventually causes peritonitis as it starts to clog up their digestive system. Lizzy Rose has an autoimmune disease that causes a similar form of obstruction, one of the symptoms of which is continuing nausea. She has been thinking about how to use her experience of long-term illness in her work, and she has been exploring how online identity technologies have transformed the experience of illness. In this work Lizzy Rose is using her own experience of blogging as a diary of illness to create empathy or compassion for another being.
My heart will go on
HD Video / 01:51 min / 2018
Beep beep. Downstream occlusion. Sharp scratch. There is a lady next door who giggles every now and then at nothing at all. Will other people’s visitors PLEASE stop using the ward commode as a chair? Non urgent, wait and see. We’ll stay forever this way. You are safe in my heart and my heart will go on and on (and if it doesn’t beep beep beep). Normal pulse range 60-100 beats per minute. Normal respiratory rate 12-20 breaths per minute.
The meaning of the wild
HD Video / 08:52 min / 2018
The meaning of the wild, a video showing students at the Ohara School in Tokyo Japan, attempting to master the art of arranging flowers called Ikebana, an art form which is over 600 years in the development. The video’s narration – half instructional, half philosophical inquiry attempts to guide us through the meaning of these actions accompanied by text from The art of flower arrangement, a book teaching Amercian home makers a simplified version of this complex art form. Pure Ikebana is more precise, combining geometry and natural forms; the wildness of nature meeting rational aesthetics. By replicating landscape it aims to create a transformative space that evokes which is described as a kind of spirituality, or sacred place. The work explores landscape, form, magic and the pursuit of knowledge between cultures.