This research project is a first-person, practice-led endeavour which contributes to the fields of both medical humanities and the sonic arts. Through a reflexive, auto-ethnographic process, employing a wide range of audio-visual methods, I set out to explore a range of possible creative strategies that might be available to the ‘artist in extremis’ – i.e. the artist working under conditions of illness, confinement, restriction or limited energy. This process was distilled down, over five years, to three conceptual vehicles in the form of vinyl records which sought to offer openings, strategies and responses to conditions of extreme limitation.
From 2009-2014, the three vinyl record projects were developed by myself, an ex-broadcast filmmaker continuing to navigate a life under Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS-ME) since 1998. Each vinyl record project contains strategies across a given stratum of life of the ‘exhausted artist’. The project created a body of both methodological and practical outputs, aiming to bypass the exhaustion, poor cognition and pain associated with CFS-ME.