Elizabeth Rooklidge and Dillon Chapman
Sick Women (in bed), 2023, inkjet print, 10 x 8 in.
[Image description: Three images arranged in a column against a white background. Each depicts a woman in bed. In the first, a white woman wears a hospital gown, while her skin looks mottled and her eyes are ringed with red. In the center image a woman with smooth, white skin and perfectly coiffed hair looks sorrowfully at the visitor next to her. In the bottom image, a woman with light skin and brown hair lays on the bed, her head thrown back in agony or ecstasy.]
Elizabeth Rooklidge is a writer, curator, and educator whose work focuses on the intersection of art and illness. In essays, exhibitions, art history courses, and now visual art, she considers the ways in which embodied experience goes awry when we become ill. For her new project, Sick Women, Rooklidge has collected a range of films featuring the titular figures as primary characters. Watching these movies, she rephotographs selected stills, and then arranges them in collages to probe the visual vocabulary that represents sick women in popular culture.
Rooklidge corresponded via email with her dear friend, HereIn Contributing Editor Dillon Chapman, about the series in a conversation touching not only on illness and media, but on meaning-making, imagination, and empathy.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Dear Elizabeth,
I've been trying to figure out how to approach writing about your photographic project Sick Women (2023-ongoing), and, while I love writing about art in a more conventional format (as I have done now several times for HereIn Journal), this method feels somehow inappropriate. Inadequate. I wonder if you would indulge me in an experiment: an epistolary collaboration of sorts, through email, in which we can untangle (and perhaps re-tangle) the subtleties and complexities of this beautiful conceptual project of yours.
Maybe the best way to start this would be for me to identify the connections I'm making between your work and the work of other artists and writers. Immediately I think of Taryn Simon and her typological projects. The various groups of your photographs—in bed, pain face, hooked up, sick room, angelic, hands, visitors, and foreshortened—give us a concentrated look at how women who are sick are viewed in our society through how they are framed in media. Of course each of the images that you have made are exquisite, but it is the situating of them in these taxonomies that really reveals these complexities. It is through the comparing, contrasting, framing, and curating that you pose this question: "What does it mean to 'look' sick?".
Sick Women (foreshortened), 2023, inkjet print, 10 x 8 in.
[Image description: Three images arranged in a column against a white background. Each depicts a foreshortened view of a woman in bed. In the top and bottom images, the women have breathing apparatuses affixed to their faces. In the bottom image, a visitor sits in the foreground, outside the woman’s hospital room, with her head bowed.]
Each of these groupings is striking, yet, knowing you and your penchant for Catholic imagery, I am particularly interested in Sick Women (foreshortened). I am reminded of Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ (1480), which I'm sure you're familiar with. There is an obvious visual connection, but I am thinking too of the role of martyrdom in the Catholic faith and the framing of the images for this group within your series.
It is hard to not see the religious undertones, particularly of the image of Shelby (Julia Roberts) in Steel Magnolias (1989) on life support as M'Lynn (Sally Field) sits at her feet, head bowed, as if in prayer. Shelby is diabetic and more than anything she wants to have a child, against her mother's wishes. I recall a scene in which M'Lynn says to her, "There are limits to what you can do," regarding Shelby's status as a person with diabetes and the difficulty and dangers of pregnancy for people with diabetes. Despite this, she has a child, which strains her body, leaving her needing a kidney transplant (provided by M'Lynn), and ultimately, she passes away because it is all too much for her body. Like the image of Mary in Mantegna's Christ, M'Lynn is an intermediary for how we are supposed to feel about Shelby's situation. This is complex of course, and, for all of my love of this film, there is an ableist undertone to the whole thing. I wonder what you think of this?
Recently, I've been re-reading Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others with my history of photography class at San Diego State University. In it she engages with the work of Georges Bataille and his preoccupation with a lingchi (the Chinese torture of a hundred cuts) photograph. Sontag asserts that "he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation. . ." Are these figures of sick women in film meant for exaltation? I am not asking your intent, but the intent of the filmmakers. In the case of Shelby, from Steel Magnolias, I think so.
I'm curious what your thoughts and feelings around these things are.
Looking forward to your response,
D
Sick Women (sick room), 2023, inkjet print, 8 x 10 in.
[Image description: Four images, arranged in a grid, each showing a different woman in her sick room. At the top left, a black and white photo captures a woman with 1940s hair, dressed in white, reading a book in a neatly made bed. At the top right, a woman sits on a cot in a dark, sparely furnished room, holding an oxygen mast to her face. On the bottom left a woman lies hooked up to medical equipment in an expensive-looking hospital room. On the bottom right, a woman lies slumped in an ornate, mahogany bed.]
Monday, December 18, 2023
Dear Dillon,
It is wonderful to read such thoughtful contextualization of my work. I made (and continue to make) this series from a very embodied position, I think, even more so than an intellectual one. Until recently, most of my work has been curating, writing, and teaching, through which I am bringing a critical framework to artists’ practices. So it feels odd to be in this position now, of making art and having a collaborator approach it with the kind of critical eye I usually bring to others’ work. Odd, but good.
The series is, of course, a critical project—wanting to analyze the cultural typology of sick women and attempt to pinpoint where it fails us, or how it might offer generative possibilities. But it stems from a kind of desperation on my part, a hunger for a reflection of my experience that might help me better exist in a sick body, in a world that is wildly inhospitable to chronic illness. The conceptual issues you bring up intersect with my personal embodiment so acutely.
I appreciate your question about whether or not the women in these films are meant to be exalted. I think that, for the most part, they are. We see this manifest in a number of ways, but the one that comes to the forefront of my mind is related to beauty. The women in these films are almost always conventionally feminine, thin, and overwhelmingly white, their appearances constituting what our sexist, white-supremacist, anti-fat culture believes deserves concern and care. A beautiful woman who is suffering is a tragic but exalted figure.
Sick Women (angelic), 2023, inkjet print, 10 x 8 in.
[Image description: Three images arranged in a column against a white background. Each depicts a closeup of a different woman. All three women have light skin and dark hair, and look ethereal and dreamy in white clothing under the camera’s soft focus.]
The need for an intermediary figure (as in the Mantegna painting and in Steel Magnolias) points to the fact that in these films, it’s not the sick woman the viewer is intended to empathize with, but rather the people surrounding her—those who are well. So it’s the caregiver, the one who loves the sick woman, who is seen as the most exalted. Saintly, even.
There is, though, something not entirely off-point about this idea that there is a kind of transfiguration that happens in illness. Many people turn to spirituality with a new urgency when they become seriously ill, or when an illness is prolonged. Illness forces us to search for ways of being that, to some degree, transcend pain. If we don’t, we’ll be swallowed whole by it. But it’s not as simple as these films—with their dynamic of exaltation—make it out to be. Exaltation strips away the reality of illness, and of spirituality—yes, there can be some measure of acceptance and peace found in it, but there is often rage, despair, and feelings of betrayal, too. These things co-exist. This dynamic is why, though I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, I think illness pulls us deeper into what it means to be human.
Warmly,
E
Sick Women (pain face), 2023, inkjet print, 10 x 8 in.
[Image description: Eight images arranged in a grid. Each features a closeup view of a woman whose face bears an expression of pain, fear, or exhaustion. All the women have light skin, with the exception of the actress Rosario Dawson (at the top right), who has medium-light skin. They also all have delicate, traditionally feminine features. The collective effect of their facial expressions is one of melodrama.]
February 20, 2024
Dear Elizabeth,
I appreciate your response, particularly how you situate that this is not merely a conceptual project, but an embodied endeavor and, to some degree, a desire for mirroring (or representation). These films that you are rephotographing frames from offer a distorted perspective, but sometimes that's all we have to go on.
Your project presents a kind of searching, a digging through the archives, and a critical consideration of those archives. Exaltation is a kind of distortion, and it is through the re-presentation of these materials in these typologies that we see the visual grammar that has been developed around depictions of sickness, and particularly, sick women. I wonder too if this is an extension of misogynist scopophilia, the pleasure in looking. I think your project does the work of letting the air out of that particular balloon. Within the context of a single film, we perhaps might not notice this, but through an accumulation of sources, a bibliography of sorts, we can see quite clearly how an archetype has been developed.
Looking at the images, I also think, as I often do, of the work of Hervé Guibert. This time of his book Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary (a book I've been meaning to give you). At the time of writing it, Guibert was undergoing treatments in the hopes of saving his eyesight from an infection that developed as a result of complications with AIDS. The diary is frank, unflinching, and, at times, boring. Guibert is bored. Exaltation cannot be found here, for Guibert or his readers. Bedbound, he writes. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes a little. I draw a line between this practice by Guibert and your own practice of watching these films and rephotographing images with your iPhone. These are generative processes.
Very best,
Dillon
Sick Women (hands), 2023, inkjet print
[Image description: Three images of hands arranged on a white background. The top photo centers on a hand with a hospital bracelet on the wrist and a pulse oximeter on a finger. The hand in the middle photo holds a cluster of pills. In the bottom photo, two hands clasp one other against a hospital blanket. All hands in the images are light-skinned and delicate.]
March 8, 2024
Hi Dillon,
I’m grateful you brought up this parallel with Guibert’s book. It resonates with me intensely. I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly boring being ill is. Well, in some ways it’s the opposite of boring, because facing acute pain takes a kind of constant navigation—of one’s physical surroundings, of personal and institutional relationships, of one’s own mind. This is all difficult work that takes a great deal of strategy and adjustment. But it is, simultaneously, the most tedious, uninteresting kind of work. The kind one would never choose to do. And when I don’t feel good enough to do anything—when I have to rest—for long stretches of time, I often wish I could be doing something stimulating, even thrilling. But mostly I can’t, I have to rest. And not, like, the “do a face mask and paint my nails” rest that popular self-care culture champions, but staying reclined and largely immobile for an extended period if I am to start feeling a bit better.
Viewing these films and rephotographing their imagery is an activity constituted by small gestures. I lay down on the couch and prop my computer on my lap. I press play, I watch, I pause, I hold my phone up, I click the camera app button. I press play again. It often feels like not enough. But, I mean, enough for what? Enough for productivity culture? Enough for capitalism? Enough for an art world that rewards grueling hustle? I don’t have the energy to go along with all that. But the thing is, these small gestures add up. To something real and meaningful, I hope. And that’s sort of what happens when you have a chronic illness—your life might shrink to a series of small gestures, but I think those gestures become transformed to bear a kind of substance and gravity they wouldn’t otherwise have. It all adds up to something that can connect you to other people, or at least to those with the imagination and empathy to receive your work—your self—with real care. You have been one of those people in my life.
E
Sick Women (hooked up), 2023, inkjet print, 10 x 8 in.
[Image description: Two closeup images of women’s faces, each hooked up to a blue breathing tube. Both women have light skin and blonde hair.]
March 17, 2024
Dear Elizabeth,
Ultimately, I believe these “small gestures” that you refer to in your last correspondence are what constitutes an art practice. I think small gestures can be a form of counterhegemonic resistance, particularly in this moment of late stage capitalism. Capitalism and disability rights and justice are fundamentally at odds, so an art practice (especially one that doesn’t seek to be interpolated by the art market) that prioritizes rest—something that is not always a leisure, but an embodied imperative for you—is radical in its own right. This is purely thinking about the parameters surrounding your art practice. Under capitalism everything is work or labor, and according to the artist and writer, Gordon Hall, everything we do as artists is part of the work of art that is produced. Photographing these film scenes, laying on the couch because you must rest, having dinner parties with loved ones. All labor, but also all part of the artistic process that has led you to producing Sick Women.
To conclude, your project feels timely, in that it looks with a generous and generative eye, while also pointing to a more mainstream disability politic that is beginning, not without historically rooted difficulty, to develop in the collective consciousness. It asks critical questions without giving the answers, allowing a viewer to enter with their own personal history while considering a collective cultural legacy. I feel incredibly lucky to know such a multitalented and generous person, and that you have trusted me with writing about and around your work. In doing so I am reminded that art is fundamentally about sharing, about offering something to other people.
Best always,
D