Joanne Tiffany is an artist based in Wakefield currently studying Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University.
Joanne’s work, from both a political and poetic viewpoint, explores the social contract, expressive of accepted social norms, as an invisible agreement. Whilst this purportedly offers benefits for all, the self-same supposedly ‘inclusive’ social contract can also serve to restrict personal liberties.
This is best exemplified in issues of access which can be infuriatingly restrictive. Her work confronts the hypocrisy within this and the inherent practices therein that disadvantage or worse still even negate certain constituencies. Living with disability and chronic illness her multi-disciplinary practice whilst highlighting health and wellbeing draws primarily but not exclusively upon her own lived personal experience to be both progressive and positive.
This can be seen in recent work Idle Hands, a crocheted lap blanket encompassing hidden narratives of the history of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum. It is shown in the exhibition Recollections May Vary at the Mental Health Museum, Wakefield. Tiffany is also an Ambassador for the Charity ‘Outside In’ attached to the exhibition.
Blind Faith consists of a 1’42” film projected onto a mixed media crochet empty pill packet hanging. It explores the power imbalance of the pharmaceutical companies highlighted through the ongoing opioid epidemic as yet another example of the failure of the social contract.
The piece highlights and scrutinises this power imbalance of the cure model approach within the pre-existing model of health which is itself conflated with the rampant disposability of administered and distributed medication ephemera.
The artwork also actively interrogates the quote, ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ to reverse its logic.
