The Weight of the Unseen

The Weight of the Unseen is an ongoing body of portrait-based work exploring the lived experience of invisible illness, with particular focus on fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, and the wider realities surrounding women’s health, including perimenopause and the medical gender gap.

Created through large-scale charcoal portraiture and heavily influenced by chiaroscuro techniques, the work investigates the emotional and physical weight carried by those whose suffering often goes unseen, misunderstood, or dismissed. Using intense contrasts of light and shadow, the portraits explore themes of visibility and invisibility, vulnerability, exhaustion, emotional fragmentation, and resilience.

The project emerged from my own experiences of navigating chronic illness while attempting to maintain everyday life, work, study, creativity and identity. It also stems from a growing frustration surrounding the ways women’s pain and symptoms have historically been overlooked or minimised within both medical and social spaces. Rather than illustrating illness in a literal sense, the work focuses on emotional presence, expression, posture and atmosphere to communicate experiences that are often difficult to articulate verbally.

Photography plays a central role within the development process. Each portrait begins with carefully staged self-portrait photography using controlled studio lighting to create dramatic tonal contrasts and isolate specific emotional states. These references are then translated into large-scale charcoal drawings, allowing the physical process of drawing itself to become part of the work. The repetitive layering, erasing, reworking and physical strain involved in producing the pieces mirror many of the realities associated with chronic illness and fatigue.

The use of scale is intentional. By enlarging the portraits beyond life size, the viewer is placed into an intimate confrontation with the subject. The work invites prolonged observation, encouraging audiences to engage with emotions and experiences that are frequently hidden behind the surface of everyday functioning.

Although deeply personal, The Weight of the Unseen aims to move beyond autobiography and create space for wider conversations surrounding chronic illness, mental health, exhaustion, identity, and empathy. The project seeks not only to represent invisible conditions, but also to challenge the silence and misunderstanding that often surround them.

The completed series will be exhibited at Fleetwood Market Gallery in July 2027.