What does it mean to make something when your body has become the subject of medical scrutiny? This exhibition sets out to explore that question, not in the abstract, but through the lived experience of eight artists who have each faced surgery, hospitalisation, or chronic illness and found in art a language to speak through.

I brought this group together after connecting with the artists through both art and heart patient networks. Their work spans oil paint, printmaking, lithography, crayon, dressmaking, digital drawing and mixed media. With artists from the UK, the USA, and Australia. What unites them is a conviction that the act of making and the act of looking can become a form of healing.

The show is installed along the level one corridors at University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire, where it will remain on view through to September. The location feels fitting: these works were made in proximity to hospital life, now they return to it.

Here is a little about each of the artists and the work they've brought.

Caz Wilson

The rib cage dress

Caz Wilson (Great British Sewing Bee winner in 2025) contributed THAT zip-up dress inspired by her experience of heart valve replacement surgery. Standing against an operating theatre sign, the garment celebrates life after scarring. Unzip it, and you find the heart itself. It is wearable artwork as autobiography, as defiance, as joy.

Ashley Bravin

Disability Alphabet

In this series, everyday objects take on new weight. The bed — ordinarily a place for sleep — becomes a recovery space, a home office, a site of confinement. Bravin's work explores disability, identity, and the challenge of communicating these realities to others. Her own service dog appears as the model for S is for Service Dog, a quiet, tender image at the heart of the series.

IG: @ashleybravin

Iluá Hauck da Silva

Petrous Butterfly

Mind Morphed

Da Silva combines hand drawing with digital technology to reflect on a life-threatening infection in her petrous bone (at the base of the skull) that led to sixth nerve palsy, affecting her eye movement and vision. Her pieces interweave anatomical imagery with religious symbolism, exploring the experience from the perspective of both bone and eye. The work was developed further during a residency with the Royal College of Optometrists.

IG: @iluahauckdasilva

Prashant Kansara

Woman With A Fan I

Woman With A Fan II

Coventry-based artist Prashant Kansara works in drawing and film to navigate life with bipolar disorder. His two vibrant crayon portraits, bespoke to this exhibition, draw on the influence of Henri Matisse, using colour to soothe. He invites viewers to consider how art can bring peace in times of internal and external turbulence.

 IG: @frontlinefuturekicks

Kathryn Lean

Wired Heart

Working in lithography and collage, Australian artist Kathryn Lean draws on her experience of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a heart rhythm condition. In Wired Heart, she collages ECG cables directly onto the print, each one hand-carved, inked and printed, each unique. The bright cables speak to the medicalisation of the body and to the feeling that the heart can become separated from the self during treatment. It is an image about the tension between body and spirit in medical settings.

IG: @kathryn.lean.artist

Sarmed Mizra

Leaves in Love: What A Rush!

Leaves in Love: Found My Way Home

Glasgow-based painter and printmaker Sarmed Mizra is also a sailplane glider pilot — someone who has seen the earth from above. His daily practice, by contrast, is at ground level, among the trees. His intricate paintings of leaves are an invitation to pause. His philosophy is simple: the way we attend to the world shapes how we live in it and how we leave it. A fallen leaf. A swaying branch. The birdsong behind the traffic.

IG: @sarmed.m.art

Ruby Vartan

Light through the Cracks

California-based performance artist and painter Ruby Vartan grew up in war-torn Lebanon. She uses her own body as a paintbrush, working in fabric, paint, charcoal, and ink. Light through the Cracks is a celebration of the resilient female spirit, figurative and abstract, layered with meaning. The forward movement of the body becomes a metaphor for moving forward into healing. It is a message of hope: that light will always find a way through, no matter how dark it is right now.

IG: @rubyvartan

Charlie Kirkham

Heart Transplant, Hyacinth

Swapping Bikes for Cameras (ICD)

My own contribution is from an ongoing portrait series of people living with implanted cardiac devices (pacemakers, ICDs: many of them young patients navigating heart conditions alongside navigating adulthood0. Heart Transplant, Hyacinth includes a small hyacinth tucked into the model's hair, honouring a friend lost along the way. Swapping Bikes for Cameras is a portrait of a former competitive cyclist adapting to life with a pacemaker after complete heart block- one cycling-short brace lowered to avoid pressure on the device, a detail that says everything about the before and after. These are portraits about transformation, and about the unexpected forms that life can take.

IG: @charliekirkhamart @charliekirkhamcurator

Each work in this exhibition offers space for reflection. Together they give voice to the everyday struggles that accompany illness and to the resilience, creativity and humour that can exist alongside them. I hope that in these images you find something that speaks to you. That you feel a little less alone in whatever you are carrying.

Curation Exhibitions Art & Health UHCW 2026