Amy Izat

In 2014 at the age of 20, Amy collapsed from a brain haemorrhage whilst working and living in Sardinia. Luckily the Grandmother of the little boy she was looking after found her and was able to drive her to hospital, where she was put into a coma for three days. The haemorrhage was caused by a right parietal/occipital Artero-Venous (AVM) - essentially a malformation of blood vessels in her brain. Amy’s parents flew out immediately and were told she had a 50/50 chance of surviving. After two weeks and an emergency operation, her condition had stabilised and she was flown to hospital in Newcastle where she spent four weeks in the High Dependency Unit undergoing numerous operations and procedures to seal the AVM in her brain and the many problems it was causing. 

After a year recovering at home, Amy was then able to get back on her feet and move to Salisbury where she enrolled onto the drawing and painting course at The Sarum Studios. Amy’s ambition was to become a classically trained portrait painter, using traditional methods to capture close likenesses in oil paints. However, a regular pattern of migraines, shunt pains, vision disturbances, extreme fatigue and a constant fear of knowing an AVM was still present made a huge impact on her quality of life and the amount of energy and focus Amy could give to the course. It wasn’t long until she was back in hospital, with further haemorrhages, complications and undergoing more procedures - a pattern which repeated itself over and over. Amy had short periods of time recovering at home or in Salisbury, but complications from previous procedures kept returning and leading to her being admitted to hospital again. Following a long and invasive operation, Amy suffered a stroke and loss of feeling down her left side; after another she had another bleed in the brain, alongside an E-coli infection that had managed to reach the brain in this time, causing her to be in the high dependency ward for ten weeks. It was here she began to suffer from depression which caused concerns about her physical deterioration. These cycles of hospitalisation, recovery, relapse and the endless streams of operations Amy has had to undergo were just too much. She felt like she would never heal. Worried about the negative impact this had on both her physical and mental health, the doctors asked for Teasel, Amy’s black Labrador, to pay her a visit, much to everyone’s surprise. It was this moment of having Teasel lie next to her on Amys hospital bed for a whole day in silence that she smiled for the first time in weeks. It triggered a realisation of what was waiting for her beyond the hospital walls if only she could keep on fighting. 

Since then, Amys health has improved but trying to get back to a normal life is much harder than she could have imagined. She has suffered from daily migraines, fatigue, anxiety, visual disturbances, post-traumatic stress and trying to get used to being half blind in both eyes. Last year, Amy underwent another operation to try and release pressure from more developed cysts by inserting a catheter. However after thinking her AVM had been sealed, Amys surgeon discovered it wasn’t. She suffered another big bleed and woke up almost completely blind - a moment that was not only terrifying but completely devastating. She was rushed back in to the operating room where they removed the catheter and blood clot. Amy woke up from this one able to see again but had lost her central point of focus on top of the left side making it difficult to see a whole figure now. This was  particularly frustrating because it seemed to dash her dreams of finishing her training in portraiture, where the goal is to paint an exact likeness of a person. 

To describe what her vision is like, would be to say it is a little like looking through a window and only seeing out of the top right-hand panel. There is no focus, so everything moves and becomes confusing in her brain, which results in her feeling very tired and dizzy especially in busy, crowded places. 

Amy hit a real low point a year ago, after recovering from the double operation in which she lost her central point of focus. Amy was so angry with life, and for experiencing all this at an age when everyone else she knew seemed to be having fun. A visit from the local Vicar reminded Amy about having trust and faith in life again. Choosing life, and to really live it, was the hard option, but it was the choice she wanted to make. The next morning, she woke her mum up and got her to take her to the beach to watch the sunrise. It was the first time Amy was able to feel a sense of gratitude for still being able to see where the sun hit the water - even in a distorted way. Amy may not see a whole face anymore, including her own, nor see the whole outline of someone, or watch a film being able to see the whole screen, but the gratitude of what little she has left hasn’t stopped her in learning how to make sense of what she does see and put it on canvas.  

“Perhaps strangely, the whole experience has increased my sensitivity when drawing a subject, making me able to somehow capture a character better with a softness to my mark making. People often comment on the detail and sensitivity of the character I have drawn. I have so much more determination, so much appreciation for the vision I have left. These are gifts I don't think I would have had without everything I've survived through. 

I have spent the last few years drawing people’s animals, spending days creating an exact likeness of the subject by using grid techniques to try and create a well-proportioned figure. This exhibition is making me explore not what I see, but what I experience, in the fuzzy interactions between what I can and cannot see and what this means for my perspective on the world. Imagine a large drawing with a huge amount of blank space but still framed as though it was there. 

For this exhibition, I have drawn each subject as I would when doing a commission - with painstaking detail and precision. After finishing each drawing, I have passed an eraser onto a fellow artist whom I trust and have worked with since the age of 17, to erase the area of the subject that I no longer see when looking at it directly, into its eyes. The idea of having someone I trust, take away something that was once beautiful and perfect and whole symbolises the process of every time I went into the operating room, having a bit of vision taken away. However, it’s this empty space and blurred field of vision that has been erased that’s the important part of my journey. By letting people into how I experience the world now, I hope to feel a sense of internal peace at last, knowing that my experience is being recognised and understood, presented alongside other artists living with visual impairments. Recognising others are on a similar journey is making me feel less alone with my daily struggles. Through my work, I hope to turn a loss into a gain, something completely unique and individual that has been gifted to me by dint of never giving up. Nature and in particular birds, have been my comfort and healing mechanism, and so my work consists of specific subject matters that have helped me along the way and hold symbolic meaning to every stage of my journey.”

Amy is producing a series of artworks based on her own visual experience.

 
 

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