Lizzy Rose

Things I Have Learned The Hard Way is the first retrospective of the Margate-based artist and disability activist Lizzy Rose (1988-2022). Lizzy died in January 2022 following a long struggle with chronic illness, cutting short an exciting, innovative and wide-ranging career. She lived with a severe form of Crohn’s disease, a chronic autoimmune condition affecting the gut which, in Lizzy’s case, led to intestinal failure, alongside other health conditions. Her worldview was shaped by her experience and awareness of the precarity of life. Lizzy’s later work directly addressed chronic illness and how society deals with it. Indeed, from the late 2000s onwards, her work turned a sharp eye on ‘hidden’ culture, asking the viewer to take notice and showing how by doing so we can affect the systems we are part of.