The (Self)Soothing Project is a photographic series documenting performative actions situated at the intersection of contemporary art and medical investigation. Developed through practice-led inquiry in collaboration with the support group for persons living with ultra-rare health conditions at King’s College Hospital, the project explores embodied experiences of illness within domestic spaces.

The work focuses on the difficulties that individuals living with ultra-rare diseases encounter during periods of critical health deterioration. Through carefully constructed visual narratives, the series explores intimate strategies of self-soothing and self-care that emerge within the domestic landscape in response to physical crises.

During one-to-one workshops conducted with volunteer participants, we explore and document gestures, body positions, and interactions with domestic architecture and everyday objects as forms of intuitive bodily knowledge. These movements and spatial relationships emerge as personal coping mechanisms that help alleviate symptoms such as chest tightness, shortness of breath, muscle and joint pain, abdominal pain, chronic fatigue, and severe weakness, while also creating a sense of safety during crises which can last from several minutes to several months and which recur year after year.

By tracing these performative and movement-based processes, the project reveals the body’s remarkable capacity to generate its own non-verbal vocabulary in response to crisis instinctively. Within this framework, the home environment, animated and shaped by gestures of endurance, adaptation, and self-care, serves as a source of lasting support and a safe zone.

The project provides a platform for sharing knowledge, exploring and testing self-soothing methods created by others, and developing ways of communicating personal experiences to loved ones, community members, doctors, and clinical specialists.