Fragile Bodies

Art can be a response to pain, a way of making sense of the body when it turns against itself. In Fragile Bodies, Kat Lister explores the lives of seven extraordinary artists who confronted physical adversity and transformed suffering into creativity. From Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, created when he was no longer able to hold a paintbrush or stand at his easel, to the fragmentary hope of Derek Jarman’s garden in the years he spent living with HIV, via the ephemerality of Eva Hesse’s tragically curtailed sculptural life, these stories illuminate the fragile interplay between the body’s betrayals and the soul’s resilience. Through biography, cultural criticism and personal reflection, Lister explores how bodies in crisis can yield unexpected beauty – and how art can offer resistance when words or medicine fall short.

Drawing on her own experience of illness and grief, as both patient and caregiver, Lister weaves her story into those of her subjects to ask: how does trauma influence the act of creation? What are the ethics of turning pain into art? And how do we understand creativity when the body becomes a battleground? Fragile Bodies is a meditation on vulnerability, resilience and the human drive to create meaning – even in life’s harshest moments.