Using Art as a Healing Tool: Personal Reflections from a Montreal Artist

Chronic illness is an uninvited collaborator in my life—and in my art.

Living with Lyme disease and Lupus means navigating a reality that’s fragmented, uncertain, and often invisible. The body becomes both battleground and messenger. For years, I struggled with the silence around my condition—how pain can be constant yet unseen, how fatigue can flatten identity, and how traditional language so often fails to express what illness truly feels like.

It’s through art that I’ve learned to make sense of it.
To give form to formless pain.
To transform fragility into vivid, electric expression.

I am a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist, and this is how I use my practice not only to cope with chronic illness, but to reframe it—to make it visible, visceral, and at times, even beautiful. My hope is that those who collect my work understand they are holding not just an object, but part of a personal and ongoing healing process—one rooted in truth, tension, and the luminous in-between.

Art as Survival, Not Escape

Lyme and Lupus are complex, shape-shifting diseases. Some days my joints swell until movement is a challenge. Other days, brain fog sets in like a curtain, thick and disorienting. But more than anything, these illnesses have taught me how to live in liminal space—the space between what was and what is, between visibility and invisibility, between being and barely being.

My work lives in that space, too.

I don’t create to escape my illness—I create to witness it. Each piece becomes a kind of evidence. A visual echo of what it feels like to be suspended in uncertainty and still choosing to speak through it.

Mediums That Speak the Unspeakable

My practice spans several mediums, each chosen not for their aesthetic alone, but for their ability to articulate the complexity of chronic illness.

Neurographic Ink Drawings

These highly detailed drawings explore how the nervous system reacts under stress. With multiple focus points, tangled linework, and meditative mark-making, the pieces evoke internal disarray and the scattered attention of a mind interrupted by pain. The drawing process itself becomes therapeutic—a way to externalize internal turbulence while finding unexpected beauty in chaos.

Fluorescent & UV-Reactive Mixed Media Paintings

These works are often layered, textured, and dimensional. Under regular light, they may look vibrant, but under blacklight, a second narrative emerges—one you didn’t expect to find. This duality reflects the duality of living with invisible illness: the visible self and the hidden symptoms. These pieces are not just visual—they’re sensory. They demand time, light, and interaction to fully reveal themselves—just like the stories of those living with chronic conditions.

Fluid Art

Created through visceral pours, flowing pigment, and organic reaction, my fluid art pieces channel the body’s unpredictability. These works are abstract, raw, and emotionally direct—echoes of flare-ups, fevers, and the slow return to stillness. Each pour is a moment of surrender, where control is partially handed over to gravity, chemistry, and flow—just as illness often requires surrender to what cannot be planned.

Sculptures with Needles, Glass Pearls & Pins

These pieces are the most literal expressions of pain. Constructed from needles, pins, with thousands of glass beads and pearls—the very tools that puncture, illustrating the symptoms experienced and lived daily—they represent the interface between care and harm. Beauty and discomfort coexist in fragile balance. These sculptures raise awareness for the invasive, persistent, and emotionally fraught experience of navigating chronic illness in medical systems that often dismiss or delay diagnosis. They are shrines to survival.

Liminality as Language

I describe my work as liminal art—art that explores the in-between. Not quite one thing, not quite another. As someone whose health exists in liminal space—between diagnosis and doubt, hope and flare-up, remission and relapse—I have become intimate with ambiguity.

This space, though painful, is rich with creative tension. My pieces don’t offer resolution. They offer presence. They ask the viewer to sit with contradiction. To find stillness in discomfort. To witness both the sharp edge and the glow.

The Power of Repetition and Process

While I don’t work in traditional rituals like stitching or performance, there’s a ritualistic discipline to my process. Each artwork—especially my neurographic ink drawings—requires focus, repetition, and movement over long periods of time. This practice mirrors my day-to-day life: slow, often interrupted by physical limitation, but anchored by intention.

These repetitive actions become grounding mechanisms. When my body is in pain, these controlled creative acts help me reclaim agency. They remind me that even within dysfunction, there is still space to choose. To respond. To create.

Why Collectors Matter

If you’re a collector or someone who buys art to support meaningful creative journeys, I want you to know this: your support has real, tangible impact—not just artistically, but medically and emotionally.

Living with chronic illness adds layers of complexity to an art practice. There are days when things improve, and there are days when I struggle more, when pain, fatigue or treatments limit what I can produce.

When you buy a piece, you’re not just acquiring a visually powerful work—you’re becoming part of a story that values resilience, visibility, and transformation.

Montreal: My Fragile and Fierce Landscape

Montreal is a city that shifts—seasonally, linguistically, emotionally. Its weather is extreme, its culture layered, its streets full of contradiction. That’s why I love it. It mirrors what I live through internally: the sharp turns, the unpredictability, the moments of stark cold followed by sudden bloom.

There’s a gritty beauty here. An honesty in how the city shows its wear. I pull that energy into my work—not always literally, but atmospherically. The contrasts, the textures, the sense of becoming that defines both the city and my own experience.

From Object to Conversation

One of the most beautiful things collectors have said about my work is that it “starts a conversation.” Whether it’s the glow of UV-reactive pigment revealing hidden details, or the tension between sharp pins and delicate pearls in my sculptures, these pieces invite deeper engagement.

They open up space to talk about pain—chronic, invisible, and often ignored. They allow others to share their own stories, or reflect on the unseen struggles of someone they love. My work isn’t meant to decorate. It’s meant to connect.

Available Works & Commissions

I offer a selection of finished works—paintings, ink drawings, fluid art, and small sculptures—on my Shop Page. Each piece is created slowly and intentionally, with every color, mark, and object chosen to evoke aspects of the lived experience of chronic illness.

Collectors looking for something more personal or symbolic are welcome to reach out for commissions. Whether it’s a color palette that speaks to your own healing, or a sculptural piece that reflects a personal journey, I’m open to creating work that lives at the intersection of your story and mine.

Healing, Not as Cure, But as Witness

To live with chronic illness is to live in a body that doesn’t follow the rules. But art gives me a space where I write the rules. It gives me form where I feel formless, color when I feel gray, and connection when isolation tries to take hold.

Healing, for me, is not about erasing pain. It’s about finding ways to witness it without being consumed. Through my practice, I’ve learned that healing can be luminous, imperfect, strange—and still profoundly worth sharing.

If my work speaks to you, it’s likely because you’ve felt something similar. Maybe not the same diagnosis, but the same in-between. That’s what liminal art does—it meets you in the murky middle and says, “You’re not alone.”

Thank you for being here, for seeing me, and for supporting this work.

🖤 Explore available pieces and limited editions on my Shop Page.
📩 Interested in a custom work or collaboration? Reach out here.

Together, we’re making the invisible, visible.