Heather Snay

As a health geographer Heather Snay studies the geographical self, exploring ways that the body is conceptualized as a space and how, through this framing, the inner experiences of illness become something to translate in order to share them with the external world, or a practitioner. A goal of her research is to discuss how this framing could provide new insights into improving the communication between patient and practitioner. In particular, she is interested in exploring how the visual world of art can be embraced by biomedicine in order to improve patient practitioner communication and the efficacy of biomedicine itself.

Therefore, her work focuses on deconstructing the belief that biomedicine needs to separate the subjective from the objective in order to be successful in healing its patients. To reveal the permeability of the objective/subjective divide in biomedicine, she focuses on the use of biomedical images inside and outside the place of the clinic. The ways in which biomedical images reveal the internal, otherwise invisible body, are promoted as objective inside the clinic. However, once these images leave the place of the clinic, they become more of a subjective image of an individual’s illness or injury. Heather focuses on the ways in which artists use biomedical images in their artwork to illuminate the inherent subjectivities and lived experiences of being ill. In particular, she is interested in the ways artistic expression could serve to better visualize and share embodied pain experiences.

When these images are in the place of biomedicine, do they still not contain the subjective experiences that becomes so apparent in the place of the museum or art gallery, does this disappear in the place of the clinic? Or do these images still hold these subjective experiences, but biomedicine fails to see it? What harm might this do to the patient? Does it matter to understand the entirety of the patient in the efficacy of their care? Are the boundaries between art and science are truly impermeable? When the topic is the human body can the objective be separated from the subjective?

While her interests are global, her dissertation research considers the role of art and how artistic expressions could serve to broaden the ‘medical gaze’ in Senegalese biomedicine. Through her research she hopes to collaborate with artists whose work centers on the body, illness and healing.