Life, Pain, Joy, Art And Illness In Appalachia
(ANALYSIS) In black-and-white Merriam-Webster dictionary terms, “sickbed” is defined as “the bed on which one lies sick.”
Anyone who has experienced years of chronic illness knows the reality is much more complex. Shortly before her “Para(site)dise” exhibition at the William King Museum of Art in Abingdon, Virginia, artist Jocelyn Mathewes used a pillowcase and 30 pieces of fabric to create a 7-by-9-foot floating sculpture called “The Bed (Horizontal Time).”
“Illness often leaves humans bed-bound, horizontal in space. Lying flat, habitating flat, a sick person exists on this plane,” she wrote in a text prepared for the exhibit, which opened in August and closes Jan. 10.
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“The bed, however, is the center of the universe — a nest, a resting place. For the chronically ill, it becomes the workspace, the conversation space. All uses are combined into a single whole, bleeding into one another, fragmented yet fundamentally attached.”
This experience touches minds and souls, as well as bodies. The sickbed can become a place for confession, penitence, forgiveness and communion. People bring faith and joy with them, as well as fear and worry.
“All of the things that you need can come to you in that bed. ... It’s a place for the sick, but it is also a place for people who love them,” she recently told me. “It can morph and change shape, and your feelings about it change with the things that are happening in it, and around it.”
In her “the tiny little high five” newsletter, she added: “A bed is a horizontal space that becomes the place of healing, the place of possibility. A bed that takes you to other worlds. A bed that you return to as a refuge. A bed that envelops you kindly, or consumes you, suffocating. It is not static. ... It sometimes takes flight.”
For 15 years, Mathewes has wrestled with a chronic autoimmune disorder, facing waves of sickness that have shaped her art and family life. She is married to Father Stephen Mathewes of Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Bluff City, Tennessee, my home parish.
The primary art form in “Para(site)dise” is cyanography, which the New York Film Academy describes as “one of the oldest photographic processes we know of, and has a distinctive blue color. Cyanotypes are made by treating a surface — paper, cloth or leather — with iron salts which then react to UV light." This was "originally used to document botanical specimens by placing them on treated papers and exposing them to the sun."
Mathewes used materials from her medical journey while creating displays for this exhibit. In a Nashville Voyager interview, she said she “started working with what illness generates — prescription sheets, medical detritus, hospital bracelets. ... I also started pulling weeds from my garden and printing them, documenting the labor.”
One work, “Spent (Mark 5:26),” looks like a plastic sheet of pharmacy capsules, but close examination shows that each capsule contains flakes of gold leaf, shredded money and fragments of printed prescriptions.
“Medicine Threshold” began with memories of a doorway curtain in her grandmother's house. Instead of strings of beads, this curtain offers decorated prescription bottles. With “The Water Was Troubled (Wound Repair in a Sterile Environment),” Mathewes put thin, gelatinous materials from Polaroid photographs on paper, which was then sewn into medical gauze.
Other works featured IV tubes, maps, medical papers folded into origami and complex patterns created with weeds from her garden, symbolizing how disease mixes with daily life.
When the exhibit opened, professional storyteller Hannah B. Harvey mixed scriptures with Appalachian tales and stories from real life. Her goal was to create a midrash — a Jewish term for a story that probes deep into scripture — while exploring the works on display.
“When we experience this kind of art, we can dive into our own experiences because what we are seeing speaks to us,” said Harvey afterward. “When you look at Jocelyn's work, you see how personally she has drawn her own story into these images, which then draw us out into the universal experiences of life. That's Jocelyn's gift. You can look at her images and then they resonate with your own life. ... That’s what good art does.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.