Beyond its spotlight on the first person, autobiography has the power to illuminate more widely, extending in the process an invitation to empathy.

Sarah Roberts’ meticulous installation SICK presents The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery visitor with a series of sets, on each of which the life of her teenage self, a carer to a chronically unwell parent, can be imagined, flickering into focus like a figure on partially-degraded videotape.

The settings themselves are anything but degraded. Quartered into four distinct though porous areas, suffused with the lavender perfume of old age atop the more astringent note of detergent, and soundtracked to the tinny euphoria of 90s Eurodance, each is finished in an over-emphatic pastel shade of lilac or green, accentuating their almost hectic over–reality. The effect, though subtly unsettling in conveying a sense of walking through someone else’s recollections, nevertheless fosters contemplation.

A bathroom cabinet hangs slightly ajar, piquing the curiosity of magpie eyes, and rewarding them, not with medications with value for resale or reappropriation, but the more discomforting sight of syringes, and all they might imply. Elsewhere, lilac bric-a-brac has been shunted to one side, metastasising disorder, in either the clutter of illness’s lethargy or the strange reassurance of hoarding, neither quite out of sight nor wholly out of mind.

Indeed, there’s something of hoarding’s impulse to balm the wounds of loss in Roberts‘ revivification of the past, one which aligns, too, with the importance of sustainability to her practice. It’s an attentiveness, of course, that holds metaphorical importance at a human scale; an insistence against the rhetoric of undeservingness and all the darkness that lies at the unforgiving heart of that cruel idea.

In the face of the bigger picture, the smaller details unfold their own subplots. Ambiguous snakes slither over multiple surfaces, purveyors of serpentine malice yet also symbols of Asclepius, the Greek deity whose rod is associated with medicine. Other trappings, in their prosaic utility, testify in their quotidian mundanity to the dull repetitions of everyday home care; the inarguable necessity of the bedpan, the convalescent diets served up on bedside trays. Their cumulative effect is one of restriction and limitation, of lives pruned back from their full potential for flowering. There is precious little scope for leeway, for moments unplanned by the deadening regime of medicines and meal times.

Aside from the heightened specifics of the sets, with their explicit exhortation that the visitor put themselves in its place, SICK’s implicit script also describes a more familiar arc, its universalities encouraging deeper identification. Whereas for some, the catheters and kidney dishes will mark out unfamiliar territories, more recognisable will be the teenage dilemma of how to reconcile one’s desire to be recognised as an individual with the counter-balancing need to be accepted, exemplified here by the customising presence of stars and stickers which add the human touch to the otherwise impersonal paraphernalia of care.

Likewise, the water cooler, an oasis in the dry circularity of in-patient treatment, which is embedded into the trappings of an end-of-the-pier amusement. With the transistorised upbeats of fairground pop audible in the background, the effect is like a coach trip to the seaside on one of those rare days on which the weather conspires in one’s favour. All it lacks is the alluring aroma of frying doughnuts to capture the intoxication of fleeting escape.

Although evoking her past, in the face of a government whose press statements call into question the legitimacy of the illnesses constraining the lives of those claiming Personal Independence Payment, and whose Health Secretary makes assertions about “over-diagnosis” while turning a strategically blind eye to the socio-economic determinants of ill health, the sluice room sink drama on Roberts’ pastel-coloured stage is very much a play for today.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Sarah Roberts, Sick (a note from 40 Sandilands Road and other stories), 2024-25. © The artist.

    

SICK (a note from 40 Sandilands Road and other stories) is at The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds until July 19, 2025. For more information, click here.