As part of our ‘In Practice’ project, Arlene Jackson reflects on a photomontage created by the artist Ashley Cook, in light of her chronic illness relapse.
An audiovisual version of this article is available at the bottom of the page.
Not so long ago, from her place within an exhibition curated on a snowdrop-white wall of a Glasgow art gallery, a fairy caught my attention. Brought to life via photomontage, her luminous female form was foregrounded amongst flora and fauna and she had been named ‘Scottish Bluebell’ (2019) by her creator, the artist Ashley Cook. Cook specialises in a narrative-driven mode of printmaking, responsive to her creative positionality where she has ‘always felt best in places […] where people live more in harmony with nature’ (Cook 2023).
Such was my immediate connection with the image that I was drawn back in time; to when my mother’s voice had called me ‘flower’ and ‘petal’ and I had responded by blossoming under her loving care. Back to when I, too, had been small enough to have felt protected by the long grass through which I had waddled and wandered, wary of the booming giants the world referred to as adults. Bluebell reminded me of that infant world in which I had heard the fairies whisper only to me and had happily talked to them in return.
Bluebell reached beyond her glass prison and signalled to me to take her home. In that moment, I understood that I had been meant to see her; to recognise myself in her. Lifted by the serendipity of it all – because for me, outings are rare and remain the stuff of lore – I willingly answered her call and watched on, enchanted, as a red dot was pressed onto the edge of her black frame.
Captured by a relapse of the chronic neurological condition with which I live – myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.) – I begin to look at Bluebell differently. As the key to my confinement is turned in the lock by a powerful malevolence, which imposes a forcefield of bad energy, I recount the folkloric myths surrounding bluebells, which speak of dark fairy magic, as they are added to witches’ potions thought capable of casting an eternal sleep. The spell of my art gallery outing has been broken and I mentally retrace the breadcrumbs of my carefully-paced journey, seeking both rhyme and reason for my falling into the shadows. Despite knowing that these bridges of self-blame should not be crossed, an ableist troll will appear and dance with glee upon my aching bones and taunt me for trying to outwit my body; I succumb to superstition.
Holding still, in the place where I must rest for now, I open my eyes intermittently and look for beauty; anywhere and in anything, and there is Scottish Bluebell, although she appears changed. Her skin is not moon-pale, but so shaded that it appears stained by the very flowers which have given her her name. She has absorbed the purple-blue hues, which secrete from her pores and spread like bruises, which bloom and fade with each of my stolen glances. She casts her eyes up in concern; out towards something which is bearing down on her and darkening the tones of her setting further. It is impossible to tell if the foliage is her protector or imprisoner. The colours deepen behind her and eventually the forest submerges to coal-black darkness and I question why I hadn’t noticed this before. Perhaps she returns there when the lights are off, or when I am better and therefore busier, to plot her escape. I fear she may be like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper (2012): left to creep in and out of the patterns and shadows on the wall of her attic room for evermore. If Scottish Bluebell carefully treads between the grass and darkness behind my back, will I step in to help her or am I already there, in her prison too? Although she looks away from the darkness, towards the light, that light is a glare so unnatural that it must be torchlight shone from above in a searching sweep, exposing her in the hope of discovering a way in, not out.
Her eyes are tired. I notice this when I intermittently lift a blackout eye mask from my own and look to her for escapism: to travel through the glass and find my way back to the forest floor of my childhood. To a particular woodland on the Dumfries and Galloway coastline where I had spent recurring summers on caravan holidays. As I wiggle my toes under the duvet and sense the pins and needles which thrum within them, I remember my baby feet, powdered with sand, flecked with stubby grass, made tender by bruises gained from rockpool scrambling. Those shoeless feet had padded through a bluebell glade, a sea of bluish-purple which had captured all of my attention as the actual sea had roared its rush of waves from where the light had sat waiting. Entranced, I had hunched down in the wood and thought how pretty, how sweet the smell, how soft the petal between my sticky fingers, how easy to pull apart and tuck carefully into my pocket. When my name had been called from high above a floral, pleated skirt and I had stood, turned, and run to catch up, out of the wood and into the light, had the fairies begun to congregate behind me to plot their revenge?
There is one long strand of bluebells behind my fairy-girl. They are more aqua than blue, the ferns more blueberry than green, a combination of flora which only partially shelters her naked torso, which is contused: pink seeping into aubergine. I see that she is not a girl or fully a woman, but a changeling, capable of bleeding and therefore at the mercy of categorisation: mad, bad, hysterical, wicked witch, lurer of good folk into her heady ring of enchantment.
‘You are none of those things,’ I say aloud and my words echo like distant bells, chiming out a song of isolation. It is no more Bluebell’s fault that she has been marked and mythologised by centuries of men than it is mine to have been fated to be disbelieved by medical misogynists who thereafter mounted their white horses and galloped away. Perhaps it is of little wonder that modern medicine views bluebells as toxic when their bulbs in fact have diuretic and styptic properties. Instead, we are to believe bluebells’ bell-shaped flowers as having religious connotations: tolling, funereal church bells, rung out with morbid intent. The thought of funerals prompts a vision of wreaths and I recall that folklore has it that one who wears a wreath of bluebell heads will only speak the truth; the whole story. And so, my narrative arcs across the gloom and lands in reality to acknowledge that I was not led astray by impish fairies. Illness is not a comeuppance for slighting the natural world, nor a castigation by those who inhabit it: it is as native to the lifeworld as the wildflowers which persist in blossoming under bleak conditions.
I think of the way in which bluebells have to fight to recover after they have been trampled upon. Their damaged leaves can no longer photosynthesise and their healing and regrowth takes years. Behind Scottish Bluebell is a line of thistles, soldiering the darkness. That well-known Celtic brave-heart thought to symbolise devotion, courage, determination and strength is part of the Asteraceae family, with sunflowers and daisies its close relatives. Closing my eyes, I reminisce on the daisy chains I made and wore on those past seaside holidays and visualise the mattress beneath me as a bouquet of these cheerful perennials, on which I rest as my forest friends place sunflower heads on my tired, sore eyes and lay thistles around me for protection and resilience. I know this resilience requires a climbing of the prickly stalk towards the violet, crowned head where the view is better. It’s a following through, a making space, an acquiescence to the body, a casting off of shame, a sloughing away of normative expectations until, naked of the smothering garment I had sewn from self-reproach, I await to be reclothed, or, like Scottish Bluebell, re-enter the world unashamed of my body.
About the author
Arlene Jackson is a postgraduate researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University. As a former nurse who now lives with chronic illness/disability, Arlene utilises her perspective from the other side of the medical fence to analyse and critique literary and scholarly representations of illness and disability. Her current project seeks to explore the meaning and value of fiction on audio format to individuals living with sensory impairments specific to myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.). She has been published both creatively and critically, including in BMJ Humanities, The Polyphony, Synapsis, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Sentinel and Thimble Literary Journal. She is available for contact by email and at BlueSky: @arlenejackson.bsky.social.
About ‘In Practice’
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
References
Cook, Ashley. 2019. Scottish Bluebell. Photomontage. Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow. Ashley Cook, Scottish Bluebell, 2019 | shop.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk. Accessed 17 February 2025.
Cook, Ashley. 2023. ‘Featured Artist Ashley Cook’. Glasgow Print Studio. https://shop.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk/exhibitions/57-featured-artist-ashley-cook-ground-floor-gallery/. Accessed 17 February, 2025.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 2012. The Yellow Wallpaper. London: Virago.
