Jane is in Rehab, Catherine Hawthorn
A mixed-media collage in vertical format shows a figure centered against a textured off-white background with visible creases and faint stains. The figure has an oversized, cut-out photographic head composed of layered facial fragments, including eyes and nose, with multiple plastic syringes inserted around the eye area like radiating spikes. The body is smaller in scale and dressed in a grey winter coat, scarf, jeans, and dark boots. The figure holds a small cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Blue triangular shapes radiate outward above the head. At the top left corner, part of a black and yellow sign reads “NO TRESPASSING.” A black bird stands near the figure’s left foot, interacting with a horizontally placed syringe. Along the bottom edge, a row of upright syringes forms a repeating border against layered blue paper resembling ground or water.
Title: Jane is in Rehab
Artist: Catherine Hawthorn
Date: 2025
Medium/Materials: Collage, photography
Dimensions: 53 cm x 45 cm
Form/Genre: Photograph, collage
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Addiction; Recovery; Survival; Perseverance
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 people accessing services at a community outreach and harm reduction center. It emerged from ongoing engagement with individuals navigating homelessness, addiction, and interactions with public space and health systems.
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