Gerry as Frida, Catherine Hawthorn
A vertically oriented photographic portrait shows a person centered in the frame, facing forward. The subject’s face occupies most of the image, cropped at the shoulders. They wear a black knit hat and a thick red scarf with a white patterned design wrapped around the neck. Their lips are painted a deep red, and their expression is neutral, with eyes open and looking directly at the camera.
A colorful floral headpiece sits across the top of the head, composed of layered cut-out flowers in pink, red, yellow, blue, and green, arranged in a dense horizontal band. The background is off-white with vertical red stripes and faint circular stains or marks.
The image surface appears cracked, with radiating fractures across the lower half of the face and neck. At the center bottom of the frame, a syringe and a pencil are arranged vertically, intersecting beneath the chin, aligned with the cracks.
Title: Gerry as Frida
Artist: Catherine Hawthorn
Date: 2024
Medium/Materials: Collage, photography, broken glass
Dimensions: 51 cm x 40 cm
Form/Genre: Photograph, collage
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Addiction; Survival; Perseverance; Art as witness
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 well-being 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 honouring 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 Gerry during an extended period of photographic engagement in Oshawa, in partnership with a community outreach center. At the time the image was made, Gerry was experiencing homelessness and economic instability. The portrait emerged through an ongoing, consent-based relational process in which the subject participated in decisions about representation, styling, and presentation.
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