“Photography was me telling the world to go jump, I was going to work in some shape or form.’’
This is how Campbelltown artist Teigan Blackshaw felt when she was diagnosed with a condition known as fibromyalgia.
In many cases, including Ms Blackshaw’s, fibromyalgia can terminate one’s capacity to hold down a normal job.
“When I had the onset of fibromyalgia, I spent a year or two trying to work but I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t stand for two hours,’’ says Ms Blackshaw.
“Which pretty much renders someone unemployable.
“So I thought, what can I do, and together with job agencies we decided I have a natural eye for photography so that was the way to go.
“And I went with it and now I am here.’’
“Here’’ is Ms Blackshaw’s modest way of saying she’s come a long way in the past couple of years.
So long in fact that some of her work is about to go on exhibition in Europe, alongside works by Salvador Dali, among others.
Her Invisible Pain series will be part of the prestigious ArtExpo 2016 in Milan, Italy for a week between September 8 and 15.
“I have been a photographer now for two years, and being an emerging artist has been challenging to say the least,’’ says Ms Blackshaw, who is 29 years old.
“But due to networking and opportunities that have come my way I ended up working very closely with the Benevolent Society with the See Me Hear Me production and exhibition all over Sydney, so I’ve been talking to other photographers and artists through Facebook.
“I started talking to a lady called Kathleen Cameron, who’s the creator and director of KC Creativity up in Queensland.
“She is also an artist and she has connections over in Milan for the art expo there and she put out a call to local artists to be part of the exhibition in Milan.
“And I was one of the ones who were accepted.’’
As simple as that.
But have a look at the 10 works in the Invisible Pain series which will be on exhibition in Milan and you will soon change your mind about that.
Dark and brooding, Ms Blackshaw’s art doesn’t pull any punches.
The reason is simple: she wants to lift the veil on invisible illnesses so people can feel comfortable talking about them.
“The day I debuted my Invisible Pain series in the Raw Artists Collection in Sydney I had a woman come up to me after I had been up on stage showing one of my images and she was in tears,’’ Ms Blackshaw tells me during an interview in a Dumaresq Street cafe.
“And her first words to me were ‘thank you so much for showing these images, they are amazing and they are real’.
“And I ended up talking to this lady – she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia two days beforehand.
“She had a 10 year fight with the doctors to be diagnosed – mine was only three years,’’ Ms Blackshaw says.
The best way to describe fibromyalgia is to imagine yourself with the flu where you don’t want to get out of bed every day for the rest of your life.
That is Teigan Blackshaw discussing her condition.
“My pain is worse in the morning and in the evening, all year round,’’ she says.
“When I wake up in the morning I am quite sore; I have been known to take half an hour to get up and move around.
“The worst part about it is that it’s invisible, and the reason I say that is because if you’re an amputee you can be a mile away but people see that you’re an amputee.
“But when you walk right past me you don’t know.’’
Her art has not only given her a new lease on life but it has helped Ms Blackshaw cope better with the fibromyalgia.
“Doing the images does put it in perspective; they say that when you put a name to something you feel so much better,’’ Ms Blackshaw says.
“And for me it’s not just about the name, it’s about being able to explain it to other people
“And being able to refer back [to the images] and say that’s how I was feeling helps because then I can have those images on my phone or I can be at an art gallery and someone asks me how am I going today and I can show them the image and say that’s how I am feeling,’’ she says.
Teigan Blackshaw says she has always been interested in the arts and studied photography and fine arts at high school.
So it was almost inevitable that the diagnosis of fibromyalgia led to the photography and her schtick of creating images that explain invisible illnesses.
“I like to tackle things that don’t leave a physical scar, because I think they’re the things we have most trouble talking about,’’ she says.
“And I want to break down the stigma of talking about things that you can’t see.’’
Teigan Blackshaw will be one of only three Australian artists exhibiting in Milan.
After that her images will also be shown at the Lugano Fund Forum 2016 in Switzerland.
Europe is a long way from Macquarie Fields, where she lives, so time will tell if this exposure in the art world of Europe is a major artistic breakthrough for Blackshaw.
She plans to continue to focus on producing art that explains invisible pain.
“My long term goal is to get people talking about invisible illnesses, it’s mostly why I am doing it,’’ she says
“If someone thinks something looks or feel like a taboo I want to get people talking about it.’’
