Acute Bed 14: COVID/Nightgown, Kelley Aitken + Megan Landes
COVID Xray: A monochrome black and white drawing depicts a frontal view of a human torso resembling an X-ray. The ribcage, spine, clavicles, and shoulder joints are prominently outlined, with lungs shaded in layered textures. The heart shape appears centred within the chest. The upper portion includes part of a skull with visible teeth. At the bottom, a dark horizontal band contains handwritten text, including a date, time, identification numbers, and a name. Strong contrasts of black, white, and grey define the composition.
Nightgown: A monochromatic white lined charcoal drawing on mylar, a transparent paper, depicts a finely embroidered white nightgown. The nightgown is drawn as if flat against a bed, with flowing lines and loose mark making.
Title: Acute Bed 14: COVID/Nightgown
Artist: Kelley Aitken + Megan Landes
Date: 2024, 2022
Medium/Materials: Charcoal
Dimensions: Diptych - 96 cm x 122 cm each; displayed side by side or overlapping
Form/Genre: Drawing
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Memory; X-ray; Anatomy; Layering
Artist Statements:
Kelley Aitken is a writer and artist who explores the themes of vulnerability, yearning, identity, place, and nature. For years, Aitken created painterly collages that used the body as emotional landscape. In the last decade, alongside larger figurative works, she has produced a suite of small charcoal and graphite drawings of friends and family that explore vulnerability as a result of illness or health condition or crisis.
Drawing someone, especially when they’ve been willing to pose naked, to show their physical frailties, creates a new layer of intimacy. Even if Aitken is alone in her studio working from photographs, she needs to enter into a psychic space that is more about the person she’s drawing than herself. Their vulnerability needs to be matched by her own. The process—and she hopes, also the final image—becomes an echo of them and those moments of connection.
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Megan Landes’ work explores witnessing the human body in states of profound vulnerability and transition. Informed by her work in emergency medicine—an experience she regards as a privilege—her drawings engage with moments where fragility and resilience coexist, including the complexities of end-of-life and the changing states of the human body. Rather than depicting specific individuals or events, Landes' drawings are a compilation of many layered memories, bringing the figure to its essential presence, allowing gesture, rhythm, and form to evoke experiences that are at once beautiful and frightening. Her work ultimately creates space for viewers to bring their own narratives forward, fostering an intimate, emotional connection grounded in the shared uncertainty and mystery of being human.
Landes creates large-scale charcoal and ink drawings at a human scale, allowing the viewer to encounter the work bodily rather than from a distance. The physicality of the materials—layered, erased, and reworked—mirrors the tension between precision and uncertainty inherent in both medicine and drawing. Working intuitively alongside careful observation, her process reflects a balance between control and surrender, inviting viewers to step into the image and engage with the work as a shared, embodied experience.
Her recent work, including this one, are collaborations with fellow artists during times of illness and recovery, to make work together that allows often buried narratives to surface, in particular the dual perspective of both patient and provider.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work is in collaboration. It was in early Spring of 2021 that Aitken’s mother, Barbara Aitken, died. Covid was in full force. Her sister and her were with their mother in her condo for the last days of her life. During that vigil, Aitken spoke on the phone a number of times to her friend and fellow artist, emergency medicine doctor, Landes, who offered counsel, much-needed information and reassurance. Aitken and Landes later created this diptych. The image on mylar borrows from a pastel erasure drawing Aitken produced in the year following her mother’s death. Landes created the large-scale charcoal drawing of a Covid lung X-ray to accompany it.
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: @meganlandesart