Liz Orton works with archival images and text to explore language, authorship and the body. Her recent work, based on personal experiences of illness, uses found medical material as a contested space to explore issues of trust and consent in doctor-patient relationships. Images can never be external to the reality they seek to represent, and by recontextualising found images, Liz exposes them to both personal and political critique, and dwells on the idea of unresolved histories.
Liz will read from two recent text-based works, Every Body is an Archive and Shadow Work. These works address tensions between personal and medical ways of knowing illness, and draw on/in multiple voices to produce fractured narratives.
In a short workshop we will explore the politics and poetics of re-working found medical material. We will enjoy the push and pull of images, working with feelings of desire and vulnerability. By co-opting medical gestures such as cutting, stitching and annotation we will use the space of the image to generate our own language.
Please bring two or three found medical images (a photocopy from a book, a postcard or a printed download from the internet). Plus pens and scissors.
Liz Orton is an artist using archival practices, both real and imagined, to explore the tensions between personal and scientific forms of knowledge. Before being diagnosed with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 2019, Liz was a Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication, and Associate Artist with Performing Medicine. She is the recipient of several major grants and awards including the MEAD Fellowship, a Wellcome Trust arts award and UCL Grand Challenges grant. She is editor of Becoming Image: Medicine and the Algorithmic Gaze, and regularly exhibits in group shows. In 2022 her work has been featured in Trigger, Tendon Magazine and Notes Journal, and her text You are My Territory will be in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine.