Lewes Exhibitions - Pay What You Can

About

In 1926, Virginia Woolf published her essay 'On Being Ill'. In it she asked why illness, something everyone experiences at some point in their lives, is so rarely written about. Part of the problem, Woolf argued, is language. We have plenty of words for love and grief. But try to describe a headache to a doctor and 'language at once runs dry'.

A century later, this exhibition brings together modern and contemporary artists who find new ways to describe illness and disability through their lived experience. Some use sculpture, gesture and mark-making where words fall short. Others respond to key themes of Woolf's essay; the view from a bed, the altered passing of time or structures of community and care.

Woolf lived a few miles from Lewes, in Rodmell. Her sister Vanessa Bell nursed her through several periods of illness, and later designed the cover for the essay's first standalone edition published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. Bloomsbury experiences of illness and madness are explored further in our sister show, 'Mad Bloomsbury'.

The exhibition is shaped by the social model of disability: the idea that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their bodies. The works acknowledge different lived realities and the exhibition aims to explore what it means to have, care for and value bodies and minds with different needs.