Ron Hollingshead

My most recent work deals directly and indirectly with circumstances surrounding personal health problems. A recent back surgery and the following complications have given much inspiration for my art making. I use my personal narrative as a jumping-off point to create artwork that brings up larger, more universal themes, such as body, disability, pain, and pharmaceutical use.

There is a ritual to taking medication. You are prescribed a drug and also prescribed its ritual. “Take this medication two times a day, morning and night.” It becomes part of your daily routine. For me this routine is what made me able to get out of bed or go into the studio to make artwork. Partly, of course, due to the effects of the medicine’s chemical reactions but, also because this ritual.

Akin to taking medicine, creating artwork allows me to hold out hope for my future well-being. Sculptor Damien Hirst (b. 1965) said, “I like the way art works, the way it brightens people’s lives up, but I was having difficulty convincing the people around me that it was worth believing in. And then I noticed that they were believing in medicine exactly the same way that I wanted them to believe in art.” Hirst adds, “Art is like medicine–it can heal. Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either.” I happen to believe in both, and I take them as a sort of combined therapy. I don’t know that one would work without the other.

Each of these rituals brings with it benefits and side-effects. In creating the artwork, my health has become a large part of the art making ritual, conceptually and, every so often, literally. I have found a way to prescribe a therapeutic experience through my art making, for it seems when I make art about my health, I sometimes affect it. Art influenced by life has become art influencing the quality of life.