Suffering from a connective tissue disorder and enduring endless calls to try and get benefits, the poet and novelist turned to painting – resulting in work that could change perceptions of disabled people
aisy Lafarge was lying on the floor in excruciating pain when she started her latest paintings. A severe injury, coupled with a sudden worsening of her health, had left her unable to sit upright, while brain fog and fatigue made reading and writing impossible. So the award-winning novelist and poet fell back on her art school training, using the energy and materials she had to hand to create impressionistic paintings of her surroundings – her cat Uisce, her boyfriend’s PlayStation controller – alongside unsettling imagery of enclosed gardens and flowers decaying.
“Making the paintings was a way of coexisting with pain,” says the 34-year-old. “I was on my living room floor in agony for a few hours, but I wanted to get something out of that time. I’ve always been fascinated by artists and writers who turn limitations into formal constraints. I see the paintings as my attempt at that.”
The works were made with basic materials: “quite cheap” paper, paints and brushes, as well as kinesiology tape, an adhesive that Lafarge, who has the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, uses to provide support to her joints and ligaments. Seeing as the tape needs to be cut in very specific ways, it leaves behind distinctive butterfly-shaped remnants that Lafarge repurposed into decorative elements. The watercolours will be accompanied by a poem cycle inspired by William Blake’s The Sick Rose and the 13th-century text The Romance of the Rose, drawing on the principles of courtly love to tell the allegorical story of a relationship in which pain is characterised as an “intoxicating, sometimes quite violent” lover.
