Caroline has a mane of red hair, wears pinks and reds, lives in a reddish/pinkish environment. She laughs a lot, loves Radiohead and interior design and has recently turned 34. She has had M.E. since the end of 1992 and, as a result, is disabled and a wheelchair user. Disability benefits are her only source of income. She is, despite this, a practising and exhibiting artist, although because of restrictions on her energy, can only work in short bursts on a small scale.

Caroline's work is being included in an Arts-Council funded exhibition that is touring the country for 18 months, about invisible disabilities` called In/Visible: Beyond Appearances, which opened on April 5th at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon.

She has seperately been awarded a grant by South-East Arts to make a video of her pictures, which will be installed in the exhibition. This is her second exhibition, the first being at the Festival of Independence at Manchester Town Hall in the summer of `99. All of which would have seemed impossible to her a few years ago.

“I used to paint before I got M.E. at the end of 1992 and, for a few years I was so ill I could do no artwork but then I began to experiment by working on a smaller scale. She started drawing in ink, in small graph-paper notebooks, of which she has now filled eleven. “I was very scared of starting to draw again. It felt like a very unthreatening way to do it. Now it’s my medium, I suppose. It feels like a story unfolding. “I found I had this whole world coming out on the pages that I had previously been unaware of. It is about how I feel about my circumstances but also something deeper as well - about the essence of myself. “My pictures are so personal and emotionally revealing people often ask whether it is therapy or art. My view is that the art I’m most interested in says most about the essence of the person. I find it therapeutic to do it and I find it more honest than the art I did before I was ill. “I like playing with the mixture of very raw emotion and humour as an antidote to that. It felt natural to combine words and pictures but I hadn’t done it before. It was about how immediate I wanted them to be.”

Now that she is gaining in confidence, she is trying to get the right equipment so that she can do computer and video work. “For a brief period, I had access to someone else's computer and I discovered working with Photoshop was ideal. It opened up new possibilities.” Ambitions? “I would love to produce a set of postcards of my work, to carry on exhibiting, to get a computer and to produce a book.”

John May

Stop Press: Since this story was written, Caroline's video installation is to be put on show at the International Conference Centre in Central Birmingham, during August and September. Caroline can be contacted via info@southlife.net