Facing the mirror: Jo Spence and Hannah Wile

Abstract

Cancer has long been a taboo, an illness surrounded by secrecy, socially silenced and consequently excluded from visual and artistic representation. This article aims to highlight the pioneering role played by two women artists: Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence. In the eighties Wilke and Spence broke away from the fear and shame of cancer to record the disease visually, making it part of their work experience, lived through in the first person. These autopathographic portraits, encompassing different strategies that range from phototherapy to the task of deconstructing stereotypes and taboos or pursuing critical militancy, helped these authors to face this disease personally, and try to unravel the metaphors and stigmas surrounding it socially and culturally.