Ashley, Saw Your Light, Without Your Shadow, Catherine Hawthorn
A vertically oriented mixed-media collage shows a symmetrical composition framed by a black lace border along the top and sides. At the center upper portion is a brick building with boarded windows; the boards are represented by vertically arranged syringes. A brick cross shape extends downward from the building’s doorway. Three black birds are shown flying across the pale, textured background near the top.
Below the building, two identical mirrored figures stand back-to-back. Each wears a black hooded jacket, blue jeans, and holds a yellow plastic bag. Circular halo-like shapes appear behind their heads, and grey feathered wings extend outward from their shoulders.
Along the bottom edge, lace overlays a row of upright syringes topped with small, colorful flowers in red, yellow, blue, and white. The background is mottled in soft grey, cream, and pale pink tones of layered tissue paper.
Title: Ashley, Saw Your Light, Without Your Shadow
Artist: Catherine Hawthorn
Date: 2026
Medium/Materials: Collage, photography, lace
Dimensions: 70 cm x 57 cm
Form/Genre: Collage, photograph
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Survival; Art as witness; Addiction; Loss
Artist Statement:
This long-form documentary photography project functions as art as witness, grounded in ethical, relational collaboration with people experiencing homelessness and economic displacement. The work examines how identity, dignity, and wellbeing are shaped and often strained by systemic instability, while foregrounding the emotional and spiritual dimensions of social health that exist beyond clinical settings.
Catherine Hawthorn’s process is lived-experience-led and consent-based. She works slowly, building trust and long-term relationships with participants, who are invited to shape how they are represented and how their stories are shared. This collaborative approach resists extractive storytelling and clinical narratives that reduce individuals to symptoms, diagnoses, or data points. Instead, her practice centers agency, complexity, and presence, while honoring the participants.
Within the context of Unsilenced Stories: Art as Witness in Health Research, UnBroken engages directly with the exhibition’s focus on identity and wellbeing by amplifying voices routinely excluded from health research and institutional discourse. The images bear witness to lived realities where health is inseparable from housing, safety, community, and meaning-making. They highlight how care, resilience, and harm are experienced relationally, not only clinically.
By bridging documentary practice, ethics, and lived experience, Hawthorn’s work creates space for dialogue between art, health, humanities, and community. The work asserts that witnessing itself is a form of care and that unsilenced stories are essential to any honest understanding of health, healing, and human dignity.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work was created in collaboration with Ashley through engagement with a community outreach and harm reduction center. Ashley died from a fentanyl overdose after the period of collaboration. The work exists in the context of loss experienced within that community.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @hawthornphotography