Neologistic Tilt

Last year, my grandmother suffered a stroke of the language center of her brain. When I visited her in the hospital, she was experiencing “jargon aphasia:” she could understand words perfectly well, and she could speak, but her language was only semi-comprehensible. She  substituted similar words and phonemes for each other. Despite her use of neologism– invented words and phrases– the emotional content of her speech was clear; I could understand what she needed to communicate. At the same time, her scrambled words told a deeper story, of an injured brain fighting to make meaning.  

She recovered from her stroke and regained complete language fluency. She remembers the feeling of an “invisible barrier” before her face, which prevented her body from speaking and moving in the way her mind intended.  

This project is an attempt to extract meaning from the seemingly illogical, incomprehensible.  Her neologisms map onto her: the piece is two-layered, with the bottom layer a black-and white portrait of her as a young woman, the core “identity” she associates with. The second layer, semi-cloudy and obscuring the first, represents that invisible barrier. It is painted with the real sentences she said during her acute illness.  

The final line, “Don’t romanticize this, Maddy,” is a reminder of the limits of this work– that no matter how hard I try to turn her language into poetry, this story is ultimately one of a medical emergency that caused a woman pain. 

Special thanks to Brandon Oby for assistance assembling this work. 

Farmland

During my first hospitalization for a childhood autoimmune disease, I had a recurring nightmare  that my doctors had transformed into farm animals. Having lost use of my right arm to  rheumatoid arthritis, I drew the images in my head with my non-dominant hand. I was never quite satisfied with my work. For this project, I recreated these animal physicians, overlaid on  an image of me. The animals take on the over-saturated color palette that I favored as a child.  

Today these animal doctors are simultaneously fear-inspiring and comforting. They remind me  of the smallness I felt as a young patient faced with teams of towering, white-coated people.  But the animals also serve as a reminder of my resilience– the creative energy I used to pull me through my illness. The final image is colorful and energetic, and I am smiling from my wheelchair.

Madeline Cheshire is a first-year medical student and artist, born and raised in New York City.  Her work draws inspiration from the body in flux– the sick body, the disabled body, and the  body in recovery. While art has always been a part of her life, her interest in medicine was  sparked by her experience living in chronic illness during childhood. Today, her practices of art  and medicine inform each other. Her two pieces featured in Medley, “Farmland” and  “Neologistic Tilt,” explore episodes of critical illness which affected her and her grandmother,  respectively. Both pieces attempt to unravel the effect of “sickness” on identity– how does  illness map onto the body of the patient? What changes, and what stays the same?  

Because no medical experience can be portrayed one-dimensionally, her art incorporates  layering and mixed media. In the case of “Neologistic Tilt,” poetry is combined with visual art.  The painted sentences, a true transcription of her grandmother’s words immediately after  experiencing a stroke, center the voice of the subject within the piece. Similarly, the focal point  of “Farmland” is the patient. Drawings expand out from the central image, never obscuring the  patient herself.  

Her art reconstructs the experience of critical illness, as seen through the lens of memory. The  practice of creation is healing in itself, bringing light to the nuances of care and recovery.