Deborah Padfield spent eight years as an actress in theatre, television and radio, specialising in physical theatre. In 1994 she became disabled through chronic pain following surgery and had to retrain within a less physically demanding field. Drawing continously while in hospital as pain relief led to a foundation course at Chelsea College of Art and Design and subsequently a BA course in Fine Art at Middlesex University specialising in photography. She spent several months as part of an exchange programme at the renowned
film and photographic school, FAMU, in Prague and returned to take up an artist’s residency at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. In 2001 she won a Sciart Award with Dr Charles Pither to explore with chronic pain patients the possibility of finding a visual language for pain. This has resulted in a series of exhibitions, talks and seminars.

Since then she has exhibited in many of London’s hospitals, and undertaken commissions for Arts Centres, Galleries and Publications, most recently Perceptions of Pain, published by Dewi Lewis in Sept 2003, ‘as if – visualizing pain’ co-authored with Professor Brian Hurwitz for the International Journal of Epidemiology, OUP October 2003, and ‘The Body in Conflict’ for the Wellcome Trust, Conference Paper, October 2003 and CD catalogue to accompany pain exhibition at the Science Museum in February 2004.

Much of her work has explored the power mechanisms within both medicine and photography. Frustrated by the powerlessness of being on the receiving end of the medical gaze for many years, she attempted to reverse the passive role of the patient and subject by putting herself in control of the camera. In her recent work she is similarly seeking an equal partnership/collaboration between photographer and subject.

Perceptions of Pain has grown very naturally out of her own journey in coming to terms with living with chronic pain and out of the many discussions with other chronic pain sufferers and staff at the INPUT Pain Management Unit, St Thomas’, where she was treated.