Artist Statement

Lee Ann Thill | Painting & Mixed-Media Art

Artist Statement

My work explores the emotional and relational experience of living with invisible disabilities — not as a fixed state, but as something that evolves over time. Symptoms, diagnosis and management reverberate through identity, relationships and emotional life.

Cellular forms are the visual language of my art practice. The biological processes underlying invisible disabilities are continuous and imperceivable, so cells are reimagined to hold experiences that resist literal representation — diffuse, multifaceted, transient. Through abstraction, I move away from the clinical and toward the felt.

Layering, scraping, tearing, and washing with paint and mixed-media collage refer to the medical experience — adherence, application, absorption, waiting — so materials and processes are an extension of the body and its care. These are not illustrations of illness, but reflections of the psychological weight, the ways relationships shift around a diagnosis, and the reshaping of identity. The work invites the viewer into that uncertainty — making space for experiences that can be personal, ambiguous and unacknowledged.