K is for Kevin
K is for Kevin is a video installation charting a journey through illness, and a series of fifty-four embroidered handkerchiefs, that feature, in the video but also hang above the audience in the exhibition space These handkerchiefs are stitched with words and images are taken from the artist's steroid-fuelled diary*, written over a period of ten months during her cancer treatment.
*This diary, as diaries should be, is private. It’s a proper outpouring, written in the middle the night when steroids, taken to mitigate chemotherapy drugs, meant there was no escape, not even in sleep. Once Natalie moved into remission, she was resistant to adding to what she saw as a glut of cancer narratives out in the culture but she gradually came to understand that she didn’t have a choice in the matter. As any survivor knows, from the moment of diagnosis onwards, once the ‘C word’ is said, you are never cancer ‘free’, it just hasn’t come back yet. Your task is to learn to live in the ‘new-normal’. "This contradictory phrase, familiar to all because of Covid 19 but long established as part of advice to cancer patients was something I wrestled with, I could find nothing normal in my new landscape. In time I began realise that in order to accept and move on with cancer now a companion in life, I had no choice but to make something, to make work that expressed, marked, mapped and witnessed my experience." Natalie Sirett 2020
*This diary, as diaries should be, is private. It’s a proper outpouring, written in the middle the night when steroids, taken to mitigate chemotherapy drugs, meant there was no escape, not even in sleep. Once Natalie moved into remission, she was resistant to adding to what she saw as a glut of cancer narratives out in the culture but she gradually came to understand that she didn’t have a choice in the matter. As any survivor knows, from the moment of diagnosis onwards, once the ‘C word’ is said, you are never cancer ‘free’, it just hasn’t come back yet. Your task is to learn to live in the ‘new-normal’. "This contradictory phrase, familiar to all because of Covid 19 but long established as part of advice to cancer patients was something I wrestled with, I could find nothing normal in my new landscape. In time I began realise that in order to accept and move on with cancer now a companion in life, I had no choice but to make something, to make work that expressed, marked, mapped and witnessed my experience." Natalie Sirett 2020