I recently wrote an article for Balance Magazine, who invited me to share my story of how art impacts my mental health. As discussed with Amy in my tutorial, this can begin to form the foundation of my case study OR my reflective practice. Article below:
"I would like to invite you to imagine.
Imagine that you have the biggest dreams of becoming a children's book illustrator. Imagine that you have met your hero, Paddington Bear's author, Michael Bond CBE, at his home in London after writing to each other for some time and gifting your illustrations to him. He inspired you to work hard and to pursue your passion. Imagine that your first year of university, undertaking an illustration degree, has gone tremendously well. You have worked tirelessly to make the beginnings of your qualification a success. Imagine that you have been given the incredible opportunity to be part of Davina McCall's 'This Time Next Year' to make the dream of creating your first children's book become a reality. Imagine that you have received the interest of Walker Books in London, who have published some of your childhood favourites, and you can't believe that you are in their headquarters talking about the book you will publish with them. Imagine your heart being so full it could literally burst!
Imagine your universe crashing down around you as your mum, your absolute best friend and your entire support network, has a severe stroke in front of you and you are helpless to stop it. Imagine your world shrinking smaller in total devastation. Imagine giving up everything that you worked so hard for to be a carer for your stroke survivor parent, who is now very dependent and very disabled. Imagine your world slowly going black as the retina in your one working eye detaches in a matter of days leaving you with complications, high ocular pressures and blindness.
I'm Kimberley Burrows and this is the story of how art saved my life.
I was born as a premature baby in Salford, Greater Manchester, in November 1988 with Congenital Cataracts that were overlooked until I was 4 years old. My childhood was spent travelling between Manchester and London to have many appointments and operations at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital. All I ever really knew was the strange game of waking up in the early hours of the morning, getting washed and dressed, travelling a long distance in the car for hours, and then being in a hospital where I'd be in various states of panic without knowing the reason I was there and what was going to happen to me. I didn't know that my blurry world, out of only one working eye, was not how everyone else experienced living. I didn't know that people didn't have accidents the way I did because I had missed the footing of the stairs or where the door was.
Art was comforting during my extended hospital stays recovering from various eye surgeries. I always reached for the crayons and paper and scribbled away without thinking of creating anything in particular. This was very much the beginnings of my art journey. Looking back, I now realise this was my way of dealing with multiple, complex feelings happening all at once. A need for escape. It was an instinctive response to feeling emotionally overwhelmed and far away from home, and was the birth of what would later become a practice dedicated to reactionary, abstract, intuitive art.
I was an exceptional student despite my sight loss from an early age, with limited help back then, but art was where I truly flourished the most. It was my favourite subject throughout my school years before I went on to take it at GCSE level receiving an A* grade. After high school, my sight unfortunately started to deteriorate further so going to college became difficult. I began to reach out to sight loss charities such as Henshaws Society for Blind People, Guide Dogs, and the RNIB during this time to support myself as a young severely sight-impaired adult and to help build my confidence, social skills, Braille skills and mobility skills with my Guide Dog, Tami. As my confidence increased so did my interest in creating art again and I entered a competition to become the Royal National Institute of Blind People's 'Young Illustrator of the Year' in 2014. After winning, and creating regular work for their Insight Magazine throughout the year, I decided it was time to go back to art college and do everything necessary in order to receive my degree in illustration.
Leeds College of Art seemed the most suitable. It wasn't too far away from home and had a specialist course aimed at mature students wanting to get back into education and receive the qualifications needed to start a BA (Hons) degree. Travelling on the train twice a week with my Guide Dog, I was starting to live an independent life and truly enjoying the higher education that was denied to me when I was younger. I went on to become a Student Representative and Student Ambassador and received distinctions in all of my modules. My first year of university as an illustration student was equally as prosperous. I was the Student Governor, had won the Student of the Year Award 2016 at The Specialist Institution Awards and had even won the Guide Dogs Partnership Award for 2017, with my Guide Dog, Tami, at the Annual Guide Dogs Awards. I received distinctions in all of my modules again and spent the summer volunteering at an underprivileged school in Kasambira, Uganda, helping to build and paint a playground for the children as well as being involved with art and play sessions. I had the most amazing month while out there with absolutely nothing but my backpack and the love of the children and the team I was working with.
When I came home from my amazing volunteering experience, I was contacted by ITV to ask if I'd be interested in being part of Davina McCall's 'This Time Next Year,' where I could make my dream of being a children's book illustrator a reality! I absolutely jumped at the opportunity and would record weekly video diaries of the work I was planning, the progress I was making and the publishers I was contacting. I met with Walker Books in London and recorded segments with them that would be used for the show, discussing the direction of the book I'd be writing and illustrating.
However, during this time, having started my second year at university and third year back in education, I was starting to fall into a deep depression. I missed the sense of purpose, community and belonging that I felt in Uganda that I didn't currently feel while being a mature student living away from home in Leeds. I was feeling isolated and began to negatively focus on myself and my weight. Anorexia quickly developed through heavy restriction of calories and misuse of painkillers but I finally felt in control of everything again, even though I was very far from it. I was sleeping all day from exhaustion, depression and malnutrition, but it didn't matter as long as I could wake up and hear my talking scales declaring I'd lost another pound. That was the ultimate success to me. It was beginning to turn into a serious problem when I'd lost 4 stone and had a dependency to Codeine. I had to withdraw from university to go home and get better, but the worst was yet to come.
At the beginning of February 2018, my mum had a severe stroke while we were out enjoying a Sunday afternoon at The Trafford Centre. One moment she was guiding me and the next she was walking into me and mumbling nonsense before collapsing onto the concrete floor of a clothing store. Everything felt like it was spinning and I could feel the blood pounding in my ears as the events unfolded before me. Staff members came rushing with oxygen tanks and first aid kits, people were crowding around and trying to find out what was going on, my mum lay crumpled on the floor. I couldn't strop crying and could barely see or remember the ambulance journey or hospital waiting room through the constant waterfall of tears.
My life had changed now and my mum needed me. Every day for the next few months I would go on the bus with my Guide Dog to visit my mum at the hospital while she was recovering and take care of the animals and the house in the evening, whilst still neglecting my own nutrition, to maintain that sense of control and power over a situation I was drowning in. I was very much alone. When my mum was well enough to come home, it was still extremely difficult for me to accept everything that had happened. She looked different, talked different and acted very childlike. I missed the person I knew and loved. How can you grieve for someone who is still technically alive? I would spend a lot of my time doing the best I could with gardening, housework, cooking and caring, but it was all too much for one person to cope with who had personal problems of their own that still needed addressing. My eating disorder was ever persistent and I was the lowest weight I'd ever been.
I could no longer set aside the time to record video diaries for 'This Time Next Year' and ITV quickly dropped me from the project. I was so, so heartbroken as I had worked incredibly hard up until this point. I was open and honest and had told them everything that was happening in my life with my eating disorder and my mum's stroke but they had tight deadlines to work towards and I was never invited back to the show.
In early September, I noticed something strange happening with my vision. It was like I was looking through a lens of tv static. I assumed I wasn't feeling well and went to sleep to try and rest my eyes but it was still there when I woke up later in the day. The morning after, I had dark floating objects across my vision. I was used to small floaters but this was something else; like an underwater scene of shadowed octopus legs swimming above me. I could barely see a thing and was horrified. In previous circumstances I would have rushed to my mum who would have driven me to the hospital, but what could she do now? Through tears I had to take myself back to the place I had been avoiding where my mum had had her stroke, The Trafford Centre, and go to the opticians for some assistance as it was the only thing I could think of doing. They sent me to Manchester Eye Hospital in a taxi where I was told that the retina in my one working eye was detaching and that it was a very serious issue. I was to have an emergency surgery after the weekend, but not before my vision changed again and a black curtain was pulling across everything I knew.
The next morning, everything was black.
I can't even begin to describe this time of my life. A blurring of days and months. Emergency surgery after emergency surgery; needles in my eyes while I was awake under local anaesthetic to relieve the build up of pressure, my own screaming ringing through my head and the operating theatre. Lying face down in a leather pillow attached to the end of my hospital bed to constantly posture my eye correctly for healing. I wasn't allowed up unless it was for the basics of eating or self care. My other retina followed suit and detached 3 months later in December and this time a silicone buckle was inserted into my right eye to keep it in place, as it had detached from a different angle. I could barely keep either of my eyes open from them constantly weeping with all of the hourly eyedrops I was having, the swelling and the heat from my burning face where the buckle was trying to reject.
The only thing keeping me going was the alcohol during the Christmas period where I'd drink myself silly to forget how much agony and discomfort I was in, with the painful realisation lurking in the background that I still could not see after months of hospital visits. I had tried to restart my second year of university and, quite frankly, it just wasn't working out. I had started a month late because of my first retina detaching, and the current brief I was trying to work on during the second detachment comprised of making an animation over the festive holidays. I would have regular panic attacks in the workshops having to sit through visual instructions with a room full of sighted peers, knowing full well that I could not make something on my own animation-wise without wanting to throw the computer out of the window. I could barely write my own name.
My final operation was in February 2019 when a thick membrane was found to have grown over my left eye where the retina had detached first. I woke up from this surgery with stitches in my eye, rather than a gas bubble as before, which proved to have been a misjudgement of kindness by my surgeon as the stitches presented me with more problems. Two stitches became deeply embedded causing me a delayed recovery, shooting pains in my eye and my face, and constant headaches. I had to withdraw from university again as too much time was taken out for recovery and I had not really made any work since my eating disorder started a year and a half before. I had so much emotional baggage at this point that I was constantly carrying around with me from the PTSD of my surgeries and witnessing what had happened to my mum. It was a black fog that was suffocating me. I was experiencing my first intrusive thoughts of suicide.
Even though I was trying to start my life anew as a blind person and finding new ways to cook, clean and provide self care safely and efficiently, the biggest obstacle to my degree had become myself and my mental health. I simply didn't want to create anymore. How could I? What could I even do as a blind person? What the hell did I have to say that was of worth? My previous practice was digital, professional and imbued feelings of nostalgia using Adobe software and a Wacom tablet to create charming characters and settings. I absolutely could not do that now with no useful sight. Why was I even trying to be in university with the younger people, the next generation of talent? I was already past my youth and my adulthood was a complete disaster. My eating disorder was my normality now, and my dark thoughts and deep depression were my roommates. I no longer knew happiness.
My third and final attempt at my second year of university was finally going okay. I had created easy strategies of making work by cutting basic shapes with paper and using basic mark making. Though my heart wasn't really in it, at least I wasn't a carer back at home and I was working towards something. Until the global pandemic of COVID-19 and the country going into lockdown.
Any remaining independence I had was now gone and the aforementioned baggage was crushing me like a boulder. I found it difficult to get help with toiletries and groceries as elderly people were seen as the priority online, not blind people. Basic items were becoming hard to get ahold of that fully abled and sighted people easily had access to, and I did not. My Guide Dog, Tami, unfortunately had a large lump on her rib cage, which was found to be a benign tumour, where her harness could no longer close around the mass. She could no longer work and provide me with assistance. She was taken to a boarder to settle in, have regular free runs, undergo surgery, and recover from her operation. This process took a very long 16 weeks. I was completely on my own, with no family or friends, and a lot of other students in my accommodation had decided to go back home. This was not an option for me as I needed to finish my second year at university and I needed to keep fighting to look after myself every day.
By August 29th, 2020, the dark thoughts broke to the surface and I wanted to take my own life. I was so exhausted of being alive, feeling miserable, and being in total isolation. I had planned what I was going to do, where I was going to do it and had typed a goodbye message in my notes app that I would send to my mum and my best friend. My eyes were stinging and aching from hours of crying and I could not have been more desperate for something to cling onto. Anything. What was my purpose in life? Was it to suffer so much pain, be so completely alone without even my Guide Dog for so long? What did I ever do to deserve any of this? Do I not deserve a chance to see, to love, or to belong? The only way out of this was to end it but before I did, a small voice in the back of my mind told me to dare to paint for one last time. If this was truly the night I left the Earth then why not try what I had been avoiding for so long. If nothing happens and I can't bring myself to do it, as I was so sure I couldn't, then I would allow myself to find the bridge and end it. But let's dare to try first.
That night things changed for me and I finally found some peace. Maybe even a glint of genuine happiness. It wasn't immediate but a spark started to ignite. I began to feel tranquil, like I was in some kind of meditative state. I had found the thing I needed to cling onto. Hope. Since then, I have never stopped making and I have never stopped being fearless. I have created around 60 artworks and enjoyed a growing following on my instagram page at @gleamedart where I have shared my journey. I know that my artwork will never be what it once was when I could see, but so what? So what? What does it matter? Letting go of that self hatred for myself and what happened to me, and finally embracing myself as I am now, was truly a transformative moment. I now paint and use oil pastels while I listen to music and while I go through the spectrum of human emotions. Sight isn't needed for either of those processes. The colour of my tools are chosen at random by what 'feels' right and the marks made vary from being aggressive, gentle and caressing to illustrate my mood.
Creating reactionary and intuitive, abstract art through my own unique, blind lens has helped me to deal with a lot of my pain, my dark thoughts, my PTSD, and my loneliness and turn those negatives into something positive and beautiful. My problems are my no means solved but I have a more level-headed approach to dealing with what is manageable and what is not. The act of being creative makes me physically feel better and like I have a reason to be here in the world; to share my story and to share my art. My own personal journey and experiences with creativity informing, and positively impacting, my mental health has lead me to build my dissertation around the subject to learn more about the history and psychology of the positive effects of art therapy. I hope to continue being inspired by this work for a long time in my practice, while undertaking a Masters degree, becoming a strong representation of a blind contemporary artist in the UK.
Through all of the heartache, the pain, and the loneliness, I have always found my way back to that familiarity of creating. Just like the little girl I was at Great Ormond Street trying to understand what was going on in my life, I'm still very much doing the same now in my adulthood; yearning, questioning, unpicking, exploring. My output may be different to what I had originally intented to do as a children's book illustrator and this isn't the journey I thought I was supposed to be on but maybe, in the end, this is where I'm supposed to be. I will always keep fighting to be at peace with myself and my past. I've experienced some of the worst things a person can go through and, remarkably, I am still here through the power of art.
I could never have imagined that."
