Frances Bukovsky

My creative practice is grounded in where identity and my physical body intersect, with an emphasis on my experience as a chronically ill, disabled, and queer person. I create bodies of work that explore how these aspects of my identity relate to the external world, focusing on my connection to familial support systems, inhabited environments, and medical documentation. 

Photography has become an integral practice of healing and self discovery that is central to my artistic expression. My intention is to facilitate conversations about health and disability with vulnerability as a catalyst for empathetically considering broader perspectives. 

Themes of privacy within a medical and disability context arise throughout my work as I create images of intimate and emotionally charged moments. By making work in both home spaces and medical environments I encourage the viewer to consider illness as existing beyond a hospital setting, and as something present in the day to day lives of individuals managing ongoing disease.

I use multiple photographic processes in order to approach my personal experience from multiple conceptual perspectives. This allows me to simultaneously highlight the complexity of living inside current societal structures while managing multiple incurable diseases, as well as problem solve how to make invisible illnesses and symptoms apparent in a visual medium. The processes most prevalent in my work include self portraiture with a traditional lens, a variety of film and digital formats, and lumen prints incorporating my personal medical archives. 

My work attempts to offer a nuanced view of chronic illness that goes beyond common perceptions of sickness to engage in conversations around the inherent humanness of disability and disease. www.francesbukovsky.com