Natasha Duggan
Community Artist, Patient Voice
Wildflower inks, waiting for aortic endo-leak surgery 2021
In winter 2020, I was informed I had a complicated aortic endo~leak, it was eventually decided that surgery was an option and a date was set for the first week of June 2021. After my operation was cancelled the first time, I began to focus on the wildflowers that were coming up in the garden. I drew them daily, using sticks and inks. The process kept me in the present, focussing on the flow of lines and marks. I felt it helped me navigate the difficult emotions that arose over the month.
Finally after recovery, I’m back in the garden doing ink drawings, observing and capturing the changing of the season.
In my drawing creative space I can be free from the chaos, dealing with Marfan Syndrome and aortic complications and stretch beyond the limitations of my physical state. Here calms me, slows my heart rhythm, gives me rest from trauma, communicates the unspoken, complicated and much more. My relationship with art changes. Sharing that space with others, the medical students, can bring voice to the transformative healing that can be felt on the personal and collective level. Observing the garden and embodied mark making has been profound in my recoveries, daily life, it’s expanded my sensory awareness to nature and its cycles, the vulnerabilities of life beyond my own physicality, connection to the wider world.
Hospital sketching
I started sketching in hospital after a long stay in ICU in 2010, when I had acute myopathy and heart failure from complications in surgery. Eventually I was seeing a physio team regularly. I remember passing a sponge between my hands to get them working again. It was a relief when I could communicate. Then I was able to ask for my sketchbook and pencil. I could look forward to drawing spidery lines of the things on my table.
“I always have a sketchbook and pencil with me in hospital, it’s as important to me as bringing my toothbrush. When I can, I draw what’s around me, patients sleeping and busy medics, it’s real life drawing. It helps me stay calm and centred in difficult situations or even just passing the time!”