What I find so surprising with Freda Khalo’s work is that she WENT THERE. I shouldn’t be surprised. Artists have always pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable. The sexual fantasies embedded in surrealism, the blood spurting from a severed neck in Slaying of Honofernes by Artemisia Genileschi. All Freda did was dip her paintbrush into suffering and share it with the world. But somehow, when she did it, it felt both jarring and revolutionary to me. Why though?

When I approached her work, I intended to understand the most well-known painter of suffering I know of. My art practice has been compared to hers many times, as we have both created through and about our own pain, and I thought it was time I looked deeper to see if there was anything I could glean from her work, anything I could learn about why her work left such an impact on the world. I hoped understanding her practice might offer me a path to more depth in my own work.

While she was known during her lifetime as a painter, she fell behind the shadow of her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. It was only after her death that feminists rediscovered her work and insisted it be recognized, carrying it to the legendary status it has today.

Like many, before studying her, I had remembered that Freda made work about her body and illness, and had remembered also that at times it was graphic. But by digging deeper, I noticed Freda Kahlo’s work dips into body horror. “Just a Few Nips” is a depiction of a gruesome murder by a jealous partner, and blood is sprawled all over the scene so much that it spills onto the frame itself, which appears to have been handled by bloody hands. Birth, showing a mother in labour and the baby crowing in a bloody mess, or The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, where a woman jumps from a high window and dies when she hits the ground. 

She does not shy away from her own suffering and pain in her work either; She paints self-portraits wearing medical apparatus after surgery, with symbolic nails piercing her skin and a broken spine, she portrays herself in surgery being worked on by doctors, she shares her heartbreak when her husband left by painting more self-portraits with hearts and blood. In another self portrait, thorns wrap around her neck, piercing the flesh. In another, tears fall down her face.

Then I reflected on contemporary artists tackling the suffering body and illness, such as Jenny Saville’s portraits exploring illness and trauma, Emma Hopkin’s tender paintings around miscarriage and loss, or Ellie Kammer’s powerful, and often bloody, figure paintings portraying her own medical trauma and endometriosis. These artists go there too, right into their agony.

I too have been making work in response to my disability for 8 years, but I have focused on the complexity of a body that is limited, and on exploring what resilience looks like, but I’ve never - ever - allowed myself to… well… grovel. Who wants to see that? I questioned. In retrospect, I realize that I thought it was my job as a disabled person to protect people from my suffering, to perform OKness, to play the part of a resilient and odds-conquering disabled person.

I assumed that art that circled quite hopelessly around misery and suffering would just turn people away– After all, in personal relationships, it often does. Friends may change the subject, or offer a silver lining to redirect focus onto the positive. When I consider making art as she does, I immediately want to write it off as an act of self-indulgence.

Recently, I made a playlist about grief - songs about hurt and loss. It was an experiment to discover what would happen if I just felt the hard thing–did not try to make it go away. As I listened to the songs and felt along with the artists over the course of a week, I began to notice something remarkable. The grief didn't leave, it felt just as tender, but something in me expanded and felt more able to hold it. By feeling along with the artists, I felt more connected to the human race than I had felt in a while, I realized we all suffer, and that this may be the only common ground we all share. By feeling it in this way, my grief no longer consumed me.

So, was she, and other artists who paint about their loss and pain self-indulgent? Or by deciding so, am I simply not making room for grief? Am I joining the cultural expectation of pretending everything is, and will be OK? That good conquers all? That optimism is the only way forward. Do I believe that? No… I don’t. Life does not always work out, and it often ends poorly. Art, above all else, should at least be honest.

When you sit with someone’s art, you are, in a sense, sitting with yourself, as you are with your own reactions, curiosities, likes and dislikes, biases as you respond to it. I think the power of her work is in this – when we sit with it, like with music, we are invited to put ourselves in her shoes, on her operating table, in her heartbreak, but we are also invited into our own… And in that moment, nobody is shushing us… Nobody is asking us to consider the silver lining, or judging us as self-indulgent. When we look at her work we are invited to grieve along with her… for loss after loss, as long as we need to.

I suspect people come back to Freda for permission to feel into their pain, not because it’s pleasant, but because it's there and feeling it is part of being alive. She reminds us what its like to be a living, breathing person, how it feels to exist in a frail body with a tender heart. She shows us what it looks like to make meaning out of heartache, and this matters because humans are meaning-making machines, and there will be times in life when heartache is the only ingredient we have access to.

Freda went there, so I can go there too, for myself, and for those who experience my art too, so we can exist together in authenticity, expand together and find the space to hold all of life’s experiences. 

I'm writing a visual memoir about my relationship with art through illness. This section will contain my thoughts and essays that I will leave from time to time, and perhaps teasers and snippets of the book as it moves closer to completion. Wish me luck - a book, as it turns out, is quite a feat!

Teal blue, lime green, and neon pink blared at me floor to ceiling from Katherine Duclose’s gallery exhibit, Reappraisal, last week. Bulgy and rough textures danced with each other unwilling to settle, shapes and images peaked out from behind curtains, and even through the window from the outside garden. Wall after wall had been rolled into the space, shelves mounted, tables and crates created rooms and nooks and crannies everywhere that the artist filled to the brim. The exhibition was a cacophony of delight and surprises.

This was a unique exhibit in that viewers were not held at arms length from the art, or from the role of artist. The lines were blurred as visitors were explicitly invited to touch the work, move around it, manipulate some of its objects and shapes however we saw fit, to create our own works out of colours, shapes, and textures. I indulged in doing just that.

The sheer existence of an exhibit like this inside the normally clean, white, and hallowed space of a serious gallery felt like a celebration of who I am at my very core. 

Turning to the right, I wove through the structures and had to slow down to take in even a fraction of what was offered to me. There was a dinner table that was set like a child’s fantasy; a mix of a Hogwarts potion class, the paint-swatch section of the hardware store, and the game peek-a-boo, with little surprises everywhere my eyes rested.

“Oh look!” I told my companion “There is a picture hiding under there! Oh look, those dried flowers look like they’ve been dipped in glass - how did she do that?” It was a wonder–all of it, and as a full-grown human, I don’t get invited into wonder very often.

As adults we’ve learned to rein it in. As parents and caregivers, we in turn rein our kids in too, After all that’s where we learned it first, when we were young and being taught to follow the order of things. Order is important, delight is distracting. Stay in the lines, repeat until it's perfect, do what you are told.

But at that exhibit last week, it was as if she was inviting me personally to let go– of the control, of the restraint, of the rules, and follow the lead of curiosity and delight.

I am well aware of the criticism of art shows that insist on joy. “Frivolous. Unnecessary.” Some folks think that if artists aren’t making work about pain or politics, we are out of touch, wasting our time. There are wars happening, threats to our bodies, threats to our freedoms. “What is the point of a show like this in the context of a world where danger is just around the corner?” I can hear them say.

That is the point, I think. Injections of joy, of wonder, of enchantment. These offer relief. Now more than ever we need the reminder of what it feels like to play, we need, displayed in in front of us, an example of what happens when someone follows their curiosity, when they care for it fiercely like a one cares for a precious child, feeding it and playing with it and allowing it to grow strong, to have opinions to make decisions for itself.

There is something fierce and protective in the reclaiming of delight, in re-assessing and re-building one's history, as she did in the forming of this exhibit, with permission to be oneself for the first time.

This art show, in which crystals are dangled in front of the window to cast rainbows through the room, that has a made a sculptural creature shaped from expired birthday balloons, is here precisely to remind viewers what else is possible, what else might exist beyond the fear and rules, beyond endless hours scrolling TikTok or mind-numbing day jobs and balancing the budget. When we have all but forgotten how to live in our bodies, to notice how things feel and look and sound –the sensory world that is our pathway to remembering that we are living, breathing, feeling humans.

I know, to the artist herself, this exhibit is about more than delight and the permission to indulge in it. There is layer after layer of meaning and story there (around re-evaluating history, reclaiming personhood) but that is the thing with art shows, once an artist offers it up, the viewer gets to lay claim to her own experience. For me, the invitation into wonder is what I will take with me.

After we have set up residence in our minds, this show reminded me what it was to be alive in a body, to feel with my skin, to revel at the play of color again.

This is who I am at my core, curiosity, play, delight and expression. I am still that girl who falls in love with the ladybug who lands on my ruffled dress, counts her spots and gives her a name. I’m still the girl who squeezes her doll tight so she can feel safe in my arms, who paints with bright colours, who runs towards the sprinkler on a hot summer day and squeals in excitement at how cold the water splashing is. I am this person as much as I am the one who puts the sprinkler away at the end of the day, and who releases the insect back to the wild, who adjusts the bath temperature so it is just right.

This is why we need artists–To coax us out of our comfort zones. They have learned to follow curiosity, to suspend disbelief, to play and wonder. They lead the way and entice the rest of us to follow into new and surprising territories, they tell the stories that would otherwise stay buried, they try things we are afraid of trying and, in turn, we get to see that they survived the task, and so maybe we will too.

Artists are our guides into being more fully human, and art is here for anyone who wants to grab ahold of it and find out what it’s like first-hand.

Also, if you read this before the show closes March 21st, 2026, its at The Act Gallery in Maple Ridge, BC. Go check it out.