In sickness and in death

CECILY Brennan’s punchy paintings of angry red limbs torn up with eczema are so convincing that staff from UCC’s Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) praised their accuracy.

Her work is part of a group exhibition, Living/Loss: The Experience of Illness in Art, at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in UCC, which chronicles illness from onset to outcome. Glucksman director Fiona Kearney has curated the show in association with Prof Fergus Shanahan of the APC.

Kearney wanted the show to be empathetic. “While there have been a number of exhibitions which have used a diagnostic eye, there have been very few, if any, which have looked at it from a patient’s perspective,” says Kearney. “We felt that to really honour that, it was important to structure the show in that way.”