‘TRACING THE UNSEEN’
IN COLLABORATION WITH CREATIVE HEALTH CAMDEN
OCTOBER 2026 - FEBRUARY 2027
PRIVATE VIEW: 21ST OCTOBER 2026, 18:30 -20:30PM
AT THE KENTISH TOWN HEALTH CENTRE,
2 BARTHOLOMEW ROAD, LONDON NW5 2BX
about the exhibition
‘Tracing the Unseen’ is a group exhibition featuring embroidery, photography, sculpture, needle felting, painting and assemblage. The exhibition explores chronic health conditions and its diverse lived experiences.
Our bodies carry our stories. Sometimes, these stories are recognised through our scars, our skin, or the way our bodies move. Others exist beneath the surface at a cellular level. Art-making offers an exploration of these realities, giving them a new tangible form.
The exhibition examines the delicate details and overlooked realities of chronic health conditions. Often under-researched or misdiagnosed, the majority of these conditions remain difficult to identify. Related health issues and unpredictable symptoms complicate the treatment and management.
As awareness and advocacy grow, new understandings emerge, leading to the formation of communities led by acknowledgement, empathy and hopeful change. The exhibition showcases work by artists that create to advocate for themselves and others, exploring the role of a carer, a patient and the human experience of illness.
Displaying the works of six artists: Catriona Faulkner, Alice Rorrison, Coco Warner-Allen, Wenqi Zou, Billie M.Vigne, Antonia Attwood and Sara Ulfsparre – each artist is united through shared moments, materials and the navigation of chronic health conditions through creative practice.
Everyday items and found materials give insight into experience, collected during short, familiar walks in the world. Beads, sequins, twigs and trinkets are repeatedly incorporated into specific works, bringing intrigue and a sense of ritual. Changed by illness and pain, the body is reimagined through natural and synthetic materials - stitched, stuck, layered, felted and moulded to help our understanding.
A collaborative exhibition between Creative Health Camden and The Poorly Project, ‘Tracing the Unseen’ is a call for community-building, forming a space where artists, patients, health practitioners and advocates come together. In this process there is hope for the unseen to be seen.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Billie M. Vigne
Billie M. Vigne is a Kent-based artist and metalsmith whose works mythologise and archive a lifetime of bed culture.
Reworking materials from her own life, using body-centred art and craft techniques, Billie feels her way through unknown illness, searching for answers via her alter ego Bill Bones.
Billie also runs The Beer Can Votive Project; a travelling series of embossing workshops in which people make sacred offerings from recycled drinks cans. These become precious talismans instead of their traditional use as a wish for a cure.
SARA ULFSPARRE
Sara Ulfsparre is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, working across watercolour, ink, stitch, needle felting, and soft sculpture. Her practice explores the relationship between body and mind through playful yet mysterious forms.
The complicated relationship with the body is important to Sara’s practice, exploring her life story in relation to pain.
Using repetition, touch, and symbolic gestures, Sara explores contrasts—burden and protection, softness and restriction, comfort and unease. Her process is reflective and expressive, blending surreal imagery with writing to explore vulnerability, resilience, and the tensions that lie in between.
COCO WARNER-ALLEN
Coco Warner-Allen is a London-based multi-media artist who combines fine art with traditional craft. She uses her practice as a diary to explore concepts surrounding identity and conventional representations of femininity.
At the core of her textile practice is a commitment to community, using craft and humour as tools to offer healing within current society.
Following a recent diagnosis and treatment for Endometriosis, she uses her artistic practice to process her relationship with chronic health conditions and to investigate the historical oversight on women's healthcare since the advent of modern medicine.
ALICE RORRISON
Alice Rorrison is a Camberwell-based printmaker and painter. They graduated from BA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Art in 2025.
Alice creates personal mythologies in their artworks by uniting a deep love for the fantastical side of nature and folklore with their lived experience of disability.
The artworks are a space for comfort; a reflection of the time and healing Alice finds in nature.
WENQI ZOU
Wenqi Zou is a London-based artist and researcher. She holds an MRes in Fine Art & Humanities from the Royal College of Art and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and participation, her work explores the crossovers between personal interactions with the world, illness, trauma, migration and cultural memory.
Using lived experience, spoken stories, and creatively responding to specific spaces, she examines how personal and shared histories are carried through bodies, materials and places. Her recent practice increasingly engages with care, community and alternative forms of creating knowledge.
ANTONIA ATTWOOD
Antonia Attwood is a London-based visual artist working with moving image and photography.
Antonia's body of work has developed a focus on illustrating and visually interpreting how living with mental and physical illness ‘feels’. She uses sound, sculpture, still and moving image.
Her work explores how it feels for individuals to be vulnerable and overwhelmed in the world living with a medical condition. It is not about communicating a straightforward message but rather sharing interpretations of experience.
CATRIONA FAULKNER
Catriona Faulkner is a Kent-based artist whose practice explores themes of pain, ritual and devotion.
Using assemblage and hand-stitch techniques, she examines her own experiences living with chronic pain and related health challenges following an accident.
At first glance, Catriona’s work may appear comfortable and appealing, enticing viewers with its luxury and intrigue. However, a deeper exploration of use of materials, symbolism and underlying narratives reveals a personal world that confronts chronic pain head on.
creative health camden
Creative Health Camden is a pioneering charity supporting arts and community initiatives within Kentish Town Health Centre in North London. Their aim is to relieve mental and physical suffering through the use of the arts and holistic care.
Creative Health Camden operates in partnership with the James Wigg and Queens Crescent GP Practices as part of a social prescribing model, taking in-house referrals for registered patients.
They provide a range of projects and services - a medley of creative workshop programmes, dance classes for individuals living with Parkinson’s or a Benefits Advice service available to all patients.
Through their first and second-floor galleries at the Kentish Town Health Centre, and Queens Crescent GP Surgery, Creative Health Camden commits itself to curating exhibitions that explore themes surrounding health and well-being from various lived perspectives.
your journey & accessibility
Creative Health Camden has a comprehensive guide to ensure safe arrival, outlining on-site accessibility and amenities presently available.
For travel, locating the venue and accessibility, please visit here.
For exhibition enquiries, please contact thepoorlyartist@gmail.com
For venue enquiries, please contact info@creativehealthcamden.com