A light in The Room
A light in The Room. Acylic and varnish on board. 90 x 59.5cm. 2021.
All light is born of darkness.
I met Kate in about 2011. She was just finishing a film degree at Brighton and took up a studio space in the project I was running in the north of the city. In 2016, she developed a rare neurological condition called a vestibular disfunction after a bout of flu. The vestibular labyrinth, part of the inner ear, provides mammals with balance and spatial orientation and this disfunction caused caused light sensitivity and sensitivity to movement, even small movements. Kate ended up living in a dimly-lit room, unable to really look at anything. Her world shrank into intense isolation and a prolonged solitary confinement that lasted years, with no certain end.
“I remember somebody came every week for about 10 months, a friend who between the age of 25-35 was also housebound, she came over and improvised with me behind the door, using it as a kind of screen. She would organise 2-3 people to come and do audio improvisation with me. Two of these people have now become two of my best friends. She opened up the world when it was very small.”
You need to understand, Kate may have spent a long time in a dark room, but she is herself a light, and a fighter. While the intensity of her solitude may have destroyed some, one day she heard a pastor talking on the radio about HIV patients. He said that the “real part of you can’t get sick”. Another time, in the thick of depression, she spilled something and in her head made a joke about it. She made herself laugh and I said “I’m still funny, this part of myself can’t die”. She couldn’t look at text, but could write with her voice, so started writing a comedy sketch show for a podcast. It was a route out. She figured out how to live, how to be alive.
“I remember my friend said to me “one day this will all just be a memory”. I went on walks and realised that life is movement - birds flying, the wind blowing, people driving cars. Life is one moment to the other, onto the next one. Now I can write and I’m going to gigs and pubs. I think that’s worth saying. And now I’m helping someone else with their own brain training. What happened doesn’t even feel like me anymore, but when I look at it I think, woah that’s badass. I’m badass. It’s something that happened, but it’s not who I am.”
This painting is a homage to her spirited efforts to overcome the indeterminate death-in-life of The Room and her slow, yet defiant emergence from that limbo chrysalis into the light of a sunny Sunday morning.
