Fiona Johnstone is an ISSF Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Art History at Birkbeck, where she is working on a number of projects. These include: a monograph, AIDS and the art of self-representation (based on her doctoral thesis); curating an exhibition on the Adamson Collection, an art therapy collection consisting of over 5,000 patient artworks (Birkbeck’s Peltz Gallery, 2017); developing an interdisciplinary project that will look at cultural representations of stillbirth and neonatal death and their impact on the lived experience of bereaved mothers; an essay on the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres for a forthcoming publication by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation; and an essay on illness and anti-portraiture for the collected volume of essays Anti-Portraits, which she is also co-editing.
Fiona is a selected participant in Durham’s Centre for Medical Humanities New Generations Programme, and has co-convened a number of events on the visual culture of illness, including the Wellcome funded Visualising Illness.
Image displayed above is The Harvest, by artist currently unknown. Watercolour and gouache on paper (date c. 1940-50s). Courtesy of the Adamson Collection Trust
