I find myself continually drawn to creating images found in reflective surfaces, inspired by the way they facilitate image-making and how portraits can be captured in these transient spaces. In 2022, I created a solo show of self portraits and images found in reflective surfaces found in my home which was displayed at Level Centre, Derbyshire. The series was titled Sick Gaze, and explored the views, observations and contemplations both of and from the perspective of the sick body amongst domesticity. The images were printed onto brushed dibond. I loved creating this series, and i always want to pursue these ideas of image-making further.

I took this photo at the allotment inside the greenhouse, and suddenly i found it a really interesting place to consider these reflective concepts of sickness caught in a momentary image. What i was trying to explore in Sick Gaze was some of the vastness found in the small, cramped spaces of the sick existence in domesticity. Scale is endlessly fascinating to me as a sick artist, how sickness is often a practice of taking those small, cramped experiences of sameness and sitting with them, zooming in until they become vast landscapes. I hadn’t really considered how these ideas could be applied outside of domestic interiors, and it’s really interesting to me to think about how the allotment functions for me in this way.

I’m interested in the threshold of where the disabled body leaves the private space and meets a public one, and how the liminality of sick and disabled experiences results in this threshold often becoming a permanent state of being. The allotment holds lots of this sentiment in that way; not open to the public yet not wholly private, external architecture creating pockets of interior shelter found in sheds, greenhouses, chicken pens and polytunnels. We don’t live there, but the domestic finds itself out in the open all the time; old carpets used as weed suppressant, milk bottles on canes to scare the pigeons, bathtubs become waterbutts and salvaged windowpanes make up magnificent glass houses. I love the architecture of the allotment, this strange jumble of wreckage and bounty, it has a language all of its own. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way this language disrupts, how there is never a clear line of sight at the allotment, your gaze constantly interrupted by the combination of the knackered rake and rubble weighing down the tarp on a shed roof, the slump of a muck heap half covered or the debris of community life that the allotment often hosts like the storing of youth football club nets. It makes me think of illness as disruption, how there is never any straight line found in that landscape either. I love to think about gardening in this way, utilising design by not removing the disruptions but finding breaks and gaps amongst it, finding a kinship in the constant collaboration between my body and its own disruptive, uncomfortable limits.

I’m tired now and so I’m going to leave it there for now… I haven’t shared my writing/thoughts like this publically for some years now, having once been very present online via my Instagram @bella.milroy. It all feels very alien to me now to share my thoughts in a live/contemporary way like this, to share text that isn’t very polished or fully thought out. But this residency has been the first time i’ve made work in this way for so long now and i’m trying to embrace the format. It feels a bit weird, scary and nice.

Digital scans of Couch Grass roots taken from the allotment.

Couch Grass is a native grass to the UK that is an important food source for butterfly and moth caterpillars, as well as being incredibly fast growing. Left unchecked, it tunnels its way throughout the ground using its piercing runners to create rhizomes, and swamps everything it encounters. An elegant and graceful species, it is also very difficult to maintain in the garden, and can easily overwhelm other plants if left unmanaged. 

It’s a real bastard to weed, its roots forming interconnected pathways under shallow soil. Upon pulling at a clump, you can easily break one of the extensive runners, simply leaving behind another plant ready to break through the ground and grow on. But every now and again you can find yourself picking at loose, dry topsoil where all of a sudden you are lifting a root-runner from the ground like a hidden rope found in sand in some desert-island-fiction. Perfect lengths of tough, sinewy roots are untangled from the soil, often pulling whole clumps of grass with it. My favourite part of the plant however, is the brand new runners that form these blanched white spears just below the soil surface. They are so neat and clean, pushing their way through the earth in energetic spikes. There’s something about the contrast of the tangled mass of older roots that form the clumps of grass, and the newness of these glossy threads that makes for a very satisfying and tactile interaction when weeding this plant in the garden.