“I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

In winter 2024, Sop had a severe relapse of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), leaving them housebound in South East London.

That summer, in the days leading up to a friend’s birthday celebration, the artist rested carefully so they would be able to attend. The night before, they started taking what was touted as a “magic” pill for insomnia. They didn’t sleep at all and had to miss the party. But in a sleep-deprived haze, they wrote, as they described in a recent interview [1], “a solidarity rant, a kind of letter to other disabled people stuck indoors.” 

When Shape Arts, a UK disability arts organization, approached Sop with a commission, they decided to adapt the essay into a script for We Year, a mixed-media love letter to others living with energy-limiting conditions. The short film premieres at RestFest—a film festival and virtual space by and for the disability community—as part of a program co-organized by The Remote Body, Resting Up Collective, and Ort Gallery. 

With a poetic voiceover and ethereal soundscape, We Year immerses viewers in a chronic illness flare during a sweltering summer, blending decades-old archival footage from when Sop was well enough to move outside freely with recent phone footage shot at home. Shifting between past and present and between interior and exterior, the experience is at once isolating and unifying, claustrophobic and liberating. 

We Year also features 16mm direct animation, a technique that involves drawing and scratching moving images directly onto film stock rather than recording with a camera. Here, Sop used ink to overlay the orange stress bars from their Garmin watch across the entire film—a constant representation of their body that acts as a symbolic barrier between them and the audience. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist? 

I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid, when I was asked, “What do you want to be?”, I was like, “An artist!” I honestly have never thought about doing anything else. I grew up in the deep countryside, and there wasn’t much access to contemporary culture, although I was obsessed with music and music magazines. There was this teen music magazine called Smash Hits that I loved, and I made collages and scrapbooks of pop stars. When I was 13, I went to a big retrospective of the massive British artist David Hockney, who just died, and it was the first time that I’d seen contemporary art. It blew my mind, and that’s the first time I remember thinking, “Oh, this is something serious that I want to do.” 

What questions or themes does your art usually explore? 

I find it hard to make work that isn’t about my life and the things that I’m dealing with. What I do always ends up being ultra-personal. That’s not something that a lot of people do, necessarily. The act of living as a chronically ill person means that you have to live in the world in a very different way from people who are not chronically ill. Chronic illness is a fertile area for ideas. You’re living the life and thinking about the life at the same time. If you’re an artist or someone who thinks about things in conceptual ways, you can’t help but try and interpret your life into art-making, projects, or ideas. Everything’s interesting. It’s like living life wonky.

As a chronically ill person,  I can’t do a 9 to 5. I can’t necessarily keep to plans, and I can’t always do basic things, like sometimes even look after myself in a normal  way. The agency that I have is to interrogate what this life means and the challenges that it poses and what is interesting about that. What can I say that’s beyond how I would perhaps describe being sick to a stranger? Like, what’s within that? All of the work that I make—even if it looks not about that—is going to be about that.   

And then the other part of it is that I grew up in the field and was a tomboy covered in mud. My understanding of the world was through nature, and now I’m in a flat without a garden. I can see some trees in the park just over there, but quite often, I’m not well enough to go and hang out in the park. I am pretty obsessed with nature and the fact that I can’t get to it. I can’t really have that life currently.  

In your bio, you describe yourself as “a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky.” Would you please elaborate on what this means? 

When I wrote that bio, I was making work about my body being the same as the microbiome in the soil. “A torn and crooked leaf” is being chronically ill. “A root embedded in the dirt” is really what it sounds like, within the context of that specific work. And the “shoot reaching to the sky”—my work deals with pretty hefty emotions, but there’s always hope. My life is not a miserable life; it is hopeful, and I do believe there’s something so crucial in being chronically ill that you absolutely have to keep hope alive. It takes a lot of work to do that and to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s super important. If you have this restricted life, you absolutely have to shoot for the sky. Because time just goes on.  

What does working in crip time [2] look like for you? What are your long-term goals as an artist? 

If you’re truly working in crip time, it’s fairly impossible to have long-term goals. You haven’t really got a choice when you work. You can do your very best to carve out time or space. Currently, I have about a couple of hours in the early morning when I can manage to do something. My afternoons and evenings—I simply can’t make work then. If you have such a limited time to make work, the amount of work you make is going to be low. It will have to meet your capacity, and that doesn’t fit well with current art market production timelines or expectations. Sometimes, you can’t make something for a year because the thing that you should be working on—and the thing that is your work—is your health. That’s your full-time job.  

I deeply believe that making in crip time actually is truthful to the world. We would probably all be better off if we did. Really, it means making work to your capacity, and that can mean a lot of things. You don’t need to be ill to make to your capacity. 

It’s a more authentic timeline of meeting yourself where you’re at, rather than forcing yourself to meet arbitrary or toxic timelines. 

You haven’t chosen to have chronic illness—you’re forced into doing that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. Asking what would I like to do for my long-term goals—I find it very hard to answer because, first of all, I live, like, day to day and, second, when I think about what my long-term goals would be, it’s from the perspective of someone without a disability because I currently cannot see how I would be able to do more than what I’m doing unless I had an enormous amount of more support. 

How did you decide which media to work with for this project? 

Films and writing have always been the two mediums I mostly turn to, and actually they’re the most accessible things for me to do now, being housebound. When I was asked to make the film, I just didn’t have it at all in my means to film new work or leave the house, so I had to kind of figure out how to make a new work out of what I had, which was this personal essay I wrote about being stuck inside in the summer. I made the film throughout another summer of being stuck inside. A lot of chronically ill people turn their camera or phone or whatever onto their surroundings, so I had bits and bobs that I filmed. When I started making films, I would just film tons of different stuff. I had my little Hi8 video camera around the whole time, so I had lots of little clips that I hadn’t used, and I didn’t actually think that I was ever going to use them for anything. But that obviously wasn’t enough, and I didn’t really want to make a film which was just a film inside my house—there’s plenty of films like that. I had a whole bunch of old footage from the 90s. I digitized all of these tapes a few years ago, and they looked so great. A lot of that stuff was filmed out of the house, and then there were funny effects that I filmed which made it into the films. There’s a lot of blobs of color, which are actually motorway lights and ended up being this really nice kind of texture, which floated over and broke up some of the images.  

Hi8 and MiniDVs are the two cameras I was using in the past, so I have footage from both of those. And then there was 16mm direct animation. Each section of the film has a different animation running over it, but the animation is quite transparent, so it’s always there. It’s textural and has multiple meanings. And then I commissioned my friend to make the soundtrack. 

Would you elaborate on the meaning of the title of the film? 

The thing that’s turned me on most about this film is the fact that I can try and get “to year” and “yearing” adopted as a new way of describing spending all this time being sick. I think the word “year” is long enough for people to imagine, “Whoa, you are sick for a whole year. That’s a really long, unbearable time.” But then you make it into “yearing,” and then it could be even less than a year, but it’s probably closer to a year or multiple years. Then I was interested in what would happen if the years were then broken up with periods of being well, with relapses included as well.  

I find it really tiresome to have to explain the last five years of my life. So to not have to say, “Well, I was sick for a couple of years, housebound and bedbound, and then I got well again, and then I had a relapse”—it’s just like, “I was yearing.” I would love for it to become part of the lexicon of chronic illness.  

What does it mean to have “We Year” screened at RestFest? 

There’s this informal network of crip friends who work with each other. Not everyone works together, but we all know each other and there’s really close friendships within this group. They’re all small, crip-led organizations that have been made pretty much for the same purpose, which is remote events, screenings, and workshops. I was just really keen to connect and uplift all of these organizations. We created this program together, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s really nice making things with your friends. The access intimacy side of it all is real. Creating or programming with your friends is a very accessible way of making because we all understand each other and our capacities. I’ve said capacities a million times. 

You need to coin a new term for that as well. 

Okay, I’ll get on that for next time. 

We Year, through July 12 (if you start watching on June 28); RestFest Film Festival. “I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

[1] “Interview with artist-filmmaker Sop + a Special Screening of their New Film.” RestFest, 2026,
https://restfest.substack.com/p/interview-with-artist-filmmaker-sop. 
[2] In her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” 

This eloquent statement against the madness of war is the first novel in a trilogy that includes The Eye in the Door (1993) and finally The Ghost Road (1995), which was awarded the Booker prize. The story is closely based on the publications and annotated literary papers of three real men who met at Craiglockhart in 1917: psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922) and two poets: Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen wrote some of the most moving war poetry and the knowledge that he would be killed in action at age 25 simply adds to the poignant sense of futility.  

Pat Barker (b. 1943) probed the tenacious role of class within the military hierarchy, while the society, which the military purports to defend, is rapidly being transformed by the converging lives of domestic servants and aristocrats. Her descriptions are powerful: the yellow skin of women who work in the munitions factory; the surgeon who can no longer bear the sight of blood; the young soldier who cannot eat because his nose and mouth had once been filled with rotting flesh when he was hoist by a grenade into the decomposing belly of a dead German. Rivers helps the men to recall and to understand the origins of their ailments by gentle, patient conversation–a treatment that he described in Lancet, 2 Feb 1918. 

Regeneration
Pat Barker
London: Viking Press
New York: Plume
1991, 256 pages)

From the Vault: In these times, certain works of literature seem to be as relevant to us now as when they were published — possibly more relevant than the times that they depict. From the vault of the now closed Literature, Arts and Medicine Database, we will pluck a few items for their power and timeliness. 

Web image by  National Library of Medicine

Pusey, a talented and enthusiastic guide, provides the backstory to Coram’s project. Coram, a man with a history of supporting good causes, is shocked by seeing the multitude of abandoned children on his visits to London. Parents who are unable to care for their (mostly out-of-wedlock) babies have few options; as many as a thousand of these children a year are left in the streets. While other European cities have well-established institutions supported by the Catholic Church, many Londoners initially believe that caring for them is tantamount to condoning sin and debauchery. In 1737 Coram petitions the King to support the construction of a “hospital” (not in the contemporary sense of the term, but more like an orphanage). His persistence finally pays off, and he even manages to turn his idea into a fashionable cause that receives the support of London society.  

Something that is unique about the Foundling Hospital is that Coram also allies from the start with many of the leading artists of the day. These include artist William Hogarth and composer George Frideric Handel. Hogarth, motivated perhaps by his own impoverished background, becomes a Governor of the Hospital and is active to the extent that he and his wife even foster several foundlings. He executes a portrait of Coram which he donates, and encourages other artists to do the same, so that in due course “the hospital [becomes] England’s first public art gallery and establishe[s] itself as a ‘destination venue’ for fashionable Londoners” (Foundling Museum: An Illustrated Guide, p. 16).  

Because I am a classical music fanatic, I cannot wait to see the famous Handel scores and artifacts that the museum is known for. There is a precedent for a composer to ally himself with a charity; Antonio Vivaldi’s career is deeply linked to Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, a convent, orphanage, and music school. Handel becomes involved when he is invited to conduct a benefit concert in 1749 to raise funds for the completion of the Hospital chapel. For the occasion, he composes the Foundling Hospital Anthem, which proves to be his last piece of English church music. The text, adapted from Psalm 41 and the Book of Job, begins “Blessed are they that considereth the poor and needy: the Lord will deliver them in time of trouble, the Lord preserve them and comfort them. They deliver the poor that crieth, the fatherless and him that hath none to help him. The Lord will comfort them.” Since Handel is the most famous composer in England, his name ensures there will be a capacity crowd paying high prices for tickets. The following year, Handel conducts a benefit concert of his Messiah in the chapel. The event is so successful that Handel is made a Governor, and performances of Messiah become annual events. When Handel dies, he bequeaths orchestral parts for Messiah to the Hospital in his will so that the tradition can continue. Handel’s will is now on display in the top floor of the Museum. During the London Blitz, the precious document was removed by the curator’s wife who put it in her purse and left the building. When she returned, the room holding the will had been destroyed by a bomb.   

An equally impactful group of artifacts is on display on the first floor of the Museum, along with the following description:

The Foundling Hospital was relocated outside of the city in the 1920s. The earlier site was eventually turned into a children’s playground called Coram’s Fields. Gradually, as Britain moved away from the institutionalization of children and towards adoption and foster care, the Hospital closed. The Museum occupies a building in the same neighborhood as the 18th-century original and incorporates some of its interiors and architectural details. The magnificent Court Room, where the Governors conducted their business, is one of the best surviving Rococo interiors in the city.  

The spirit of the Foundling Hospital endures in the charity now known as Coram, one of the foremost voluntary adoption agencies in the UK. The Hospital’s tradition of receiving support from artists also continues. The Museum’s temporary exhibitions and commissions provide a space for contemporary artists to “enter into a dialogue with their eighteenth and nineteenth-century forebears” (ibid, p.81). Lastly, the establishment of Foundling Fellowships named after Coram, Hogarth and Handel (the recipients of which have included such illustrious artists as Julian Lloyd Webber and Emma Kirkby) ensures that the legacy of the institution will live on.  

References: 
https://medicalmuseums.org
This site contains a wealth of information about London’s medical museums, including the Foundling Museum, as well as information about Richard Pusey’s medical history tours.

The renowned English social realist and portrait painter, Luke Fildes (rhymes with “childs”), created The Doctor in 1891 after Henry Tate commissioned a painting from him for his new museum, the Tate Britain. The subject of the painting was Fildes’ choice. Despite a poor reception among art critics when it was first exhibited, the painting quickly became iconic as the physician ideal. Over its 133-year history, the painting has been used for a variety of purposes, including inspiration, education, propaganda, and politics. During that time, the ways in which the painting represents the physician ideal changed. We talk about these aspects of the painting with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She has conducted extensive research into the painting and its creator.

Links
Image of The Doctor from the Tate Britain Museum.
About Hannah Darvin at Queen’s University.
Hannah Darvin’s description of her research for the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
John Brewer Eberly’s diptych rendering a modern version of The Doctor in which computer technology is interjected between doctor and patient. 

Feature image from Wikicommon

Cold Eye, Warm Heart: Medicine and Anton Chekhov  

Jack Coulehan Aug 6, 2025

A moving portrait of Anton Chekhov, whose dual life as physician and writer reveals the deep interplay between healing and storytelling.