Picture your poisons: An intimate portrait of cancer treatment

The authors discuss both practice-led research through making and the role of data in making by using a dialogic autoethnographic format. Picture Your Poisons is an intimate portrait of a cancer treatment journey, grounding viewers in the real-world material origins of systemic anticancer treatments through the specific lens of one patient’s course of treatment. Viewers are able to explore data that is usually presented in an abstract, clinical context through a striking visual medium that elicits an emotional as well as a cognitive response. The artwork encourages the viewer to explore aspects of the patient experience relating to bodily autonomy, selfhood, and dis/empowerment in medical contexts by confronting them with disembodied partial body casts of an affected breast. The material choices for this piece, using mainly glass as a hard but fragile material, add layers of subtle nuance and meaning.