‘Pain is a violent lover’: Daisy Lafarge on the paintings she made when floored with agony | Culture
DAisy Lafarge was lying on the floor in excruciating pain when she began her final paintings. A serious injury, coupled with a sudden deterioration in her health, left her unable to stand up straight, while brain fog and fatigue made reading and writing impossible. So the award-winning novelist and poet drew on her art school training, using what energy and materials she had to create impressionistic paintings of her surroundings – her cat Uisce, her boyfriend’s PlayStation controller – as well as disturbing images of walled gardens and rotting flowers.
“Making these paintings was a way of coexisting with pain,” explains the 34-year-old. “I was in agony on my living room floor for a few hours, but I wanted to make something out of that time. I have always been fascinated by artists and writers who turn limitations into formal constraints. I see the paintings as my attempt to do that.”
The works were made with basic materials: “fairly cheap” paper, paints and brushes, as well as kinesiology tape, an adhesive that Lafarge, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, uses to support her joints and ligaments. Since the ribbon must be cut in a very specific way, it leaves behind distinctive butterfly-shaped remains that Lafarge has transformed into decorative elements. The watercolors will be accompanied by a cycle of poems inspired by William Blake’s The Sick Rose and the 13th-century text The Romance of the Rose, drawing on the principles of courtly love to tell the allegorical story of a relationship in which the pain is characterized as an “intoxicating, sometimes quite violent” lover.
The paintings and poetry will be on display this month at Dundee Contemporary Arts Center as part of We Contain Multitudes, an exhibition bringing together the work of four disabled artists. Also present are Jo Longhurst, whose latest project is inspired by bindweed, an unwanted but resilient plant; Andrew Gannon, who creates works modeled on casts of his left arm; and Nnena Kalu, whose highly textured, cocoon-like sculptures and drawings won her the 2025 Turner Prize – the first time it had been awarded to an artist with a learning disability.
“I think it’s great that Nnena won the Turner,” says Lafarge. “I haven’t seen his work in the flesh yet, but I like the way he takes up space, his fearless physicality. I hope this leads to greater inclusion of disabled artists. But I don’t want to be naively optimistic. I just have a hard time sorting out the fact that disabled artists are disabled people. Is this really a turning point, unless disabled people can afford to live in this country? And that boils down to problems structural: are they able to heat their own homes, pay their caregivers and access very basic things? It’s been an incredibly dark time from that point of view. A celebratory performance without real material change is somehow meaningless.
For many people with disabilities, the efforts of managing complex illnesses and chronic pain are exacerbated by the bureaucratic barriers they face in receiving treatment and support. Lafarge, which lives in Glasgow, has never been able to see an Ehlers-Danlos specialist on the NHS because there are none in Scotland. Many of her paintings were made while subject to long queues for Adult Disability Allowance, the Scottish equivalent of Personal Independence Allowance. “When you’re trying to get support from these institutions, which are punitive in various ways, it can also take a lot of work on your part. These processes can be incredibly difficult.”
The welfare cuts implemented by Labor last year were a “huge attack” on disabled people’s rights, Lafarge says, but she acknowledges that there has been progress in some areas, such as the increasing use of access documents, in which performers outline the adjustments they will need in a venue, such as wheelchair ramps or regular breaks. “Luckily, most of the time they come back and say, ‘Yes.’ But sometimes they say, “No, we can’t.” »
Lafarge hopes that exhibitions like We Contain Multitudes can challenge preconceptions about disabled artists – and by extension disabled people. Its four artists represent a diversity of conditions, and each approaches the subject of disability in very different ways. “One great thing that would come out of this exhibition would be people saying, ‘I wouldn’t have assumed the artist who made this is disabled’ – because that shouldn’t necessarily be obvious from the content.”
She hopes her paintings and poems will speak to people, regardless of their physical abilities. “You don’t have to be disabled to engage in this work. It’s a diminishment.”
She thought a lot about the concept of identity. “When I first got my diagnosis, I really didn’t want to over-identify and say, ‘I’m a writer with this illness.’ I just wanted to be a writer or I wanted to be an artist. There’s this pressure to outwardly identify with something that might bother you personally. It’s frustrating.
Disability, she says, should not be seen as something removed from everyday life or as a separate category of personality. “People don’t realize that this work also concerns them,” explains Lafarge. “Many people, either through old age or injury or illness, will learn something from this experience. We are one in four people. It is not unusual. It involves all of us.”
