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Here is the official poster/invitation for the Breast Cancer:a creative intervention exhibition launch on November 8th. I very much look forward to meeting those of you who will be able to attend. For those who cannot I will be posting images of all the work on this site once the show opens.This project is has become immensely important to me and the show is the culmination of many hours of work. For me however it is more a beginning than a conclusion as the Drawing Women’s Cancer project as a whole continues to develop.
This exhibition would have been impossible to realise without the support of all the women and medical staff I have worked with over the past months, and so my sincere thanks to them all. Further, without any official funding, the exhibition would have been very difficult to realise but for the generosity of those of you who have supported my work and gave to my Just Giving appeal. Once again, my thanks. 
Please join us for the opening of
Contrasts: Two Interpretations of Antigua, Guatemala
a collaboration between Jac Saorsa and Luis Fernando Noriega.
Official Opening:
Thursday 8th September 2016, 18:30- 20:30
Waterloo Tea, Wyndham Arcade
The exhibition will run from 6th September until 3rd October in our Wyndham Arcade location.
“This exhibition will fully realise the affinity between art and photography,
where both are conceived as discrete art forms in themselves,
yet at the same time they are interrelated processes of visual exploration.”– Jac Saorsa, 2016
Wyndham Arcade
The Hayes
Cardiff
CF10 1FH
The Studies for a Portrait exhibit is now closed, however for the first time I am putting up some works from the show for sale here on my website. I am hoping to raise money to fund the development of the Drawing Women’s Cancer project which is ongoing and will generate a major exhibition in November at the Hearth Gallery at Llandough hospital here in Cardiff. I am working at present on three large scale oil portraits for this project and accompanying drawings. You can find more details on the project website.
All the pieces below are from the Studies for a Portrait show. All are executed with graphite, they are signed and beautifully framed in black wood. Average size for the pieces is A3 (210 x 420mm). The price for each piece is £200 (excluding delivery)
If you are interested in purchasing any of these works please contact me: jacsaorsa@hotmail.com
Thanks!
Just got the news yesterday that I have a small amount of funding to carry out a project that is close to my heart and I have been thinking about for ages! I am of course delighted that I’ll finally be able to realise Cancer Ward 12 working at Singleton Hospital in Swansea. Work is now set to begin in November this year with an exhibition scheduled for June 2017. More details later but for now here is a brief summary of the idea.
Cancer Ward 12 draws on literature (The Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pub. 1967) and on life. It is a project that, as a discrete piece of research in its own right, carried out at Singleton hospital in Swansea, has enormous potential to further develop into a comparative study. There are two parts:
The first part involves my ‘immersion’ into the day-to-day life on the Oncology Ward of Singleton Hospital, which is a thirty bed, general oncology/haematology ward where patients with a variety of cancers and disease related symptoms are treated and cared for. Working directly with consenting patients and their family members/carers, and with health professionals and hospital staff I will document what I see and experience through drawing and written narrative. I will use a ‘narrative medicine’ approach to gather individual experiences of illness, and of different forms of giving and receiving treatment.
The second part of the project will involve developing all the notes and sketches made on site as a basis for creating a substantial a body of work for public exhibition.
Here is an early invitation to another show that I will be putting up at the Waterloo Gallery in September. This time the exhibition will be at their Wyndham Arcade venue in the centre of Cardiff, and I am excited to be working in Collaboration with Luis Fernando Noriega. Luis is a gifted fine art photographer based in Antigua Guatemala, and since my visit to the city last year we have been working together to produce something which I hope will present a rather special collaborative insight into life and culture in the city.
The good writer possesses not only his spirit but also the spirit of his friends, much like the photographer has an undeniable connection to his surroundings. For me, that perception-altering connection was made with Antigua Guatemala. A city filled with history and unique colonial architecture, Antigua offers a perfect setting to capture a compelling frame on every single one of its cobblestone streets and avenues. The contrast of the mundane wonders of everyday-life against such a unique dreamscape of a city creates the necessity to frame every shot in a way in which the foreground and the background become a single story to be told. For this exhibit I want to present Antigua in a way that no one else has seen it before. The angles and the light are crucial because Antigua has been photographed so many times and I want to take a fresh look at what my city means to me. Luis Fernando Noriega, 2016
Having spent time in Antigua, Guatemala, I was struck by its cultural richness and by my own responses to the emotional ‘nearness’ of the suffering endured by the Mayan people throughout half a millennium. Peace Accords that finally ended the conflicts of recent history were signed in 1996 but contemporary Guatemala bears the scars of war and the wounds are deep. In my practice I often use portraiture as a conceptual framework for exploring the relationship between culture and contemporary society and this collaboration with Luis Fernando Noriega is a great opportunity to bring together our two different approaches to a subject matter that is deeply meaningful. This exhibition will fully realise the affinity between art and photography, where both are conceived as discrete art forms in themselves, yet at the same time they are interrelated processes of visual exploration. Jac Saorsa, 2016
Its been an inspiring day! I have been drawing in the operating theatre at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, working alongside leading cardiothoracic surgeon Mr Francis (Frank) Wells. Here are some of the drawings I made during the two hour long open heart surgery procedure on a middle age woman.
I was fascinated, as always, to watch a surgeon at work, and to experience what I can only describe as the ‘undulating’ dynamics of the operating theatre as everybody present played their individual part in making sure the whole thing went as planned. The intensity of the procedure rose and fell – but gently, without obvious drama – from the initial ‘opening of the chest’ to the final closure. The ‘craftsmanship’ involved, and the dedication to the task at hand was orchestrated throughout – or perhaps choreographed might be a better description – by the needs of the patient who lay, oblivious to the fact that her heart was for a time no longer beating naturally.
Each time I attend a surgical procedure I deepen my understanding of why I do what I do and how much I enjoy doing it! The artist and the surgeon have much in common perhaps.
Here is a just finished portrait. This much colour is unusual for me and I am now working on a more sombre anatomical dissection piece! More of that later.
In support of the development of my Drawing Women’s Cancer project toward working with women who have gone or are going through the experience of breast cancer I have taken what is for me an unprecendented and indeed quite scary step! I have created a Just Giving page which can be found here.
https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/drawingwomenscancer
You can find more details if you click on the link, and on the DWC website, but a snippet from the Just Giving page may help…
for the majority of the work I have been self-funded, and the work has taken place within the Wales area. Now I would like to expand the project to include breast cancer and take the work beyond Wales. I am totally committed to the Drawing Women’s Cancer project and from the responses and feedback I have received since the very beginning I am convinced of the necessity to continue developing the work.
Already though after only a few hours I have received some donations so I am humbly appreciative of the support out there for my work.
I am in Glasgow once again. I am working on a book that I am writing in collaboration with one of the strongest women I have ever met. She is one of the women I worked with during the early days of Drawing Women’s Cancer and I will post more about our project together on that project site as we progress.
In the meantime, while in Glasgow, my sense of family becomes very real and almost tangible to me. It is a place we call home, me, my man, and our two children – now grown into beautiful and inspiring adults. Glasgow is a city that we call home, not through heritage but by adoption, and I still can see and feel my children with me as I walk familiar pavements. My daughter now dives in crystal waters where there is still space for her to to find what she has long been looking for. It could be on one side of the world or the other but for now she favours the sun in Latin America, while in the ‘mutual’ middle of our worlds, in Glasgow, I can spend a little time with her brother, my son, Finn Le Marinel, still here in the rain. He is a fine musician. He peers, as I do, deep into the soul, but what he sees is expressed through what others must hear, rather than see. Nevertheless he borrows my work for the covers of his albums, but I suspect that he would not wish to use the image here. It is an older piece made around 2103, maybe 2012; memory is defeated by the unimportant. What is important is that it is a piece which, in Finn’s absence, I ‘borrowed’ from him…and altered. I may have shown it before here – it was certainly shown in Illness begins with ‘I’ – but today it takes on new significance.
Contrasts is the title of this post and there are contrasts indeed in the work I am engaged in at the moment! I am busy with different aspects of five separate projects and I am feeling very positive about how things are going with all of them. A huge amount of my time recently has been taken up with completing the second body of work for the Drawing Out Obstetric Fistula exhibition in New York, but it is all now complete and arrangements for the show are in full swing. Just click on the website for more details.
I am looking forward very much of course to the NY show, and also to hopefully raising some money to fund further work on the Obstetric Fistula project. I have two other exhibitions however to work towards this year and the image here is a ‘teaser’ for one that will be launched in September in Cardiff. It will be a show in collaboration with a very gifted fine art photographer, Luis Fernando Noriega, who lives and works in Antigua, Guatemala. My oil paintings and drawings of the Mayan inhabitants of the city that I made during and after my visit there late last year, will respond to and reflect on Luis’s powerfully emotive photographs of the crumbling architecture. https://www.facebook.com/LuisFernandoNoriegaPhotography
Entitled CONTRASTS: two interpretations of Antigua, Guatemala, the intention behind the exhibition is to present both Luis’s local view and that of a visitor to Antigua, which together, simultaneously explore several forms of parallel interrelation: that between art and photography, that between the human inhabitants of the Antigua and its historical, cultural and architectural heritage, and, perhaps most importantly, that which defines the cultural disparity between Mayan tradition and contemporary society. In addition to the conventional exhibition launch event we are planning to organise an evening talk where the audience can engage with the issues that the show will raise, but more details on that nearer the time.
Dis/FIGURATION 