Iconic Fatigue is a project led by and working with people with lived experience of Chronic Fatigue, Long Covid and other energy limiting conditions. Underpinned by research and collaboration with Dr. Lucy Prodgers from the school of medicine at University of Leeds and supported by Leeds Cultural Institute. 

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Iconic Fatigue is a new visual arts project by award winning disabled artist Ellie Harrison and award winning designer Bethany Wells.  The exhibition sees Ellie work with people who have lived experience of chronic fatigue to design wallpaper and bed linen that makes visible their illness; speaking back to the public spaces they can’t physically inhabit. It occupies the space in contemporary society that people with chronic illness are often excluded from. 

 

Ellie: In 1892 Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell received a horror story called The Yellow Wallpaper about the impact of isolation on people being treated for Chronic illness. It was from former patient Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it tore to shreds his pioneering approach to treating nervous system conditions. Although the doctor never apologised, he confided in colleagues he had changed his methods because of it: art by patients changing health practices. It is now considered an important work of feminist literature. Fast forward over a hundred years from 1892 to 1993, and 11 year old me has unexplained symptoms that no one knows what to do with. I ache. I’m tired all the time. Doctors can’t work it out. Chronic Fatigue is still referred to as ‘Yuppie Flu’ and common consensus is that it doesn’t exist.

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In contemporary society the experience of people living with Chronic Fatigue, Long Covid and other often invisible illnesses is not as far away from Gilman’s horror story as we would hope. It takes the ethos of William Morris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and turns it into a protest for a post Pandemic era.