I am a visual artist and I am legally blind.
I have a form of juvenile macular dystrophy called Stargardt’s Disease, a condition I was diagnosed with in my early twenties, in my first year at art school.
(Follow the link under Researching Vision Loss for a description of Stargardt’s Disease)
Juvenile macular dystrophies like Stargardt’s Disease, often strike children, teens and young adults at the prime of their lives and the impact can be devastating.
Stargardt’s Disease, like other forms of Macular Dystrophy such as Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD), causes central vision loss, often to the point of legal blindness.
These types of eye conditions cannot be corrected with glasses, and Stargardt’s Disease, like many other forms of macular degeneration, is still incurable.
There have been many famous artists with retinal disease including Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edgar Degas and Edvard Munch, but it is striking to realise that most of these artists, with the exception of Edvard Munch, did not depict what their eye sight looked like to them.
I have taken a somewhat unique path in showing what macular dystrophy, or legal blindness, looks like from my perspective, through visual art.
To me, visual art is the perfect vehicle for capturing the experience of vision loss, because both visual art and vision loss share the same arena – the visual field where the impact of macular disease is most evident and where visual art itself finds its true expression.
The artworks on these pages examine the lived experience of vision loss, and they are in many ways, an eye witness account of vision loss.