Events

Photofantasy: an arts-based method

  • Venue: Online
  • Start: Thu, 03 Dec 2026 12:00:00 GMT
  • End: Thu, 03 Dec 2026 13:30:00 GMT
Photofantasy: an arts-based method and a radical language of cancer experience - Lizzie Merrill


What happens when the collage maker's scissors replace the surgeon's scalpel? In 1991, following a diagnosis of leukaemia, artist Jo Spence developed a practice of photofantasy that involved cutting and reworking photographs from her archive to construct new visual narratives. Produced during the final years of her life (1991-1992), these works transformed archival photographs and medical imagery into layered psychodramas that unsettled distinctions between body, memory, illness, and fantasy.

Building on Spence's legacy, this research adapts photofantasy as a participatory arts-based method and explores its potential within cancer survivorship research. In a series of workshops involving five women living beyond cancer, participants and researcher produced 32 collages, accompanied by reflective discussion and shared interpretation. Through an analysis of the artworks and workshop conversations, three interconnected themes emerged: the collage-maker as surgeon, in which cutting functioned as an act of intervention and resistance; liquid metaphors for cancer time, which visualised the suspended temporalities of illness; and the hybrid body, understood as an assemblage of flesh, medical technologies, and data.

The findings illustrate how photofantasy offers a distinct mode of meaning-making that resists narrative coherence and instead embraces fragmentation, ambiguity, and contradiction. By positioning photofantasy as both a research method and an arts-based intervention, this presentation will demonstrate its capacity to generate alternative understandings of cancer experience and to support participants in actively shaping representations of illness, embodiment, and survivorship.

Thursday the 3rd of December, 12:00-13:30, Online, on Microsoft Teams

Register here: NU QualSIG Data & Methods December session: Lizzie Merrill – Fill in form 

Do you want to present a Data & Methods Session or would you like to request that we cover a particular issue/topic? Please fill out this form: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=yRJQnBa2wkSpF2aBT74-h4ihNcNZN2tGuV2OMQQUcjVUMklZTFNURzVRVDIyRFVMRE01NEdNUkhMQS4u 

 

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