Mary Kilcoyne
About the artist:
“In July 2014 I was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Before that I was a baker, but since my chemotherapy port wouldn’t allow me to lift more than forty pounds I had to put that on hold. So I started looking for something else that I could do to be creative. Enter photography.”
About the artwork:
“My sister is the reason I took this photo. She could see how conflicted I was about cancer and chemotherapy, and the realization that my life would never be the same again. One morning she told me to grab my camera, and we walked around our property trading the camera back and forth and taking pictures. She wasn’t trying to distract me from everything, but rather to find some way to express it. Thus this work’s title, Juxtaposed. The last chapter title from The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis, always stuck with me: ‘The End of This Story and the Beginning of All the Others.’ For me, Juxtaposed reflects that there’s never just one side to cancer. There’s the sadness of the diagnosis and the joy of remission–the end of one reality and the beginning of another.”
Visuals editor:
Justin Sanders
