It's In Our Blood exhibition
Living with and beyond Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia
It’s In Our Blood is an installation co-produced with people living with Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia, who shared their experiences and created the artwork, writing and objects you see around you. Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia are inherited blood conditions that affect haemoglobin and can cause symptoms and complications throughout a person’s life.
Led by writer and world-builder Ella Achola and supported by rapper and filmmaker LINTD, the project began with a question: what does an ordinary Tuesday look and feel like when you live with a chronic blood condition?
Inspired in part by Giselle La Pompe-Moore’s Proof of Life and its attention to the small, often unnoticed things that make up a life, participants shared their own Ordinary Tuesdays: getting ready for work, taking medication, walking the children to school, making lunch for the family, praying, swimming, reading, writing, resting and trying to count some sheep. Alongside them: “drink water, drink water, drink water”; “wrap up warm!”; “check whether that pain is sickle pain”; and “keep it nutritious and add beetroot!”
Those Ordinary Tuesdays became a starting point for making:
- On a trinket tray shaped like a red blood cell, medication becomes beaded jewellery.
- A plant made from red and heart-shaped beads grows from a crocheted hanger — crochet being a pastime that came up again and again.
- In one painting, a peaceful beach holds a sickle-shaped sun; in another, a smiling face sits between the red of hospital days and the darkness of pain and crisis.
- Four-sided dice make inheritance tangible, reminding us that “one in four doesn’t mean one out of every four” — each child is another roll of the dice.
The tote bags tell their own stories too:
- A sharp crown speaks to both unexpected pain and courage, while scattered red pieces represent difficult days.
- Another is more direct: sometimes living with Sickle Cell Disease can make you angry and you just want it to “do one”.
Look a little closer and you’ll find other parts of these lives too. In Sea in the Blood, a blood-red wave captures the uncertainty of something that can be calm one moment and overwhelming the next, while prescriptions sit behind the scene as part of everyday life.
Elsewhere, Sickle Cell is imagined as an unseen horror-film villain that is always there, while throughout the room are creativity and comfort, work and family, routines built around medication, hydration and rest, and the things that bring calm, joy and a sense of self.
And in the messages participants leave for one another – and maybe for you too – there is faith, defiance and a call for change: more accessible treatments, more funding, knowing your triggers, taking your meds, reminders of resilience and, sometimes, the very practical question, “Have you had some water? Have some more.”
Together, the artwork, everyday objects, writing and film offer a snapshot of lives in which pain, treatment and uncertainty can be ever-present without being the whole story.
As Proof of Life reminds us: “There’s so much life here.”
This project has been kindly supported by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Arts at NUH, Nottingham Hospitals Charity and New Art Exchange.
