‘Foucault’s Palimpsest’, April 2026.
The palimpsest is an archival document, in form of parchment or a papyrus, that is written over older, partially erased text. The palimpsest is a critical metaphor for Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, keeping fragmented memories of the past, defining a space where a particular material exists in various impersonations and reincarnations of knowledge structures – This may be tentatively worked out as a ‘heterotopia’.
Heterotopia is described as a closed space where the boundaries of which mark a discontinuity in terms of behaviour: for example, a jail, cemetery and monastery are thus heterotopias. The heterotopia, is implied as a closed space, boasting knowledge and learning in its ‘final’ and ‘completed’ form; there is simply no room for knowledge production or conflicting embodied understanding.
The method for the palimpsest describes how history is not erased but layered with past social structures and power dynamics, whereby knowledge forms remain visible beneath current iterations and manifestations of epistemology; highlighting that current understandings are not formed on ‘a blank slate’ but are constantly rewritten over remnants of the past. We can analyse palimpestuous knowledge (relating to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text) in relation to modern medicine as layered over older, “erased” systems, revealing power struggles.
The palimpsest explains how, as in Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, that different, conflicting times and spaces coexist in one location, such as healthcare systems, hospitals, museums and cities; where one dominant knowledge power, generally heralded as colonial and/or patriarchal knowledge, battles one diminished knowledge power – e.g. indigenous and/or women’s knowledge.
‘Hospital Gown’, 2025 - 2029. Larissa Shaw. Sublimated print, CAD embroidery, screenprint, blood, on a polycotton hospital gown. 150cm x 80cm.
‘Hospital Gown’ (2025-2029) is a gown I wore in Glasgow ****** Hospital in June of 2023. I had waited seven hours in A&E, covered in my own blood, crying in pain, to see a doctor. Over fifteen GPs had ignored my symptoms of pain for 14 years prior to this visit to A&E. ‘Hospital Gown’ documents the historical and contemporary harmful medical narratives, spanning over the last 400 years, that are responsible for the current medical gaslighting in which those of us in female bodies face in being diagnosed with full body systemic chronic-pain conditions such as endometriosis and adenomyosis. The work is ongoing throughout the duration of my doctoral research, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is about emotional self-recovery from medical negligence and pushing for policy changes in endometriosis healthcare strategies.
Works in Progress for Hospital Gown, March 2026.
Screenprint, CAD embroidery, sublimation fabric print.
Research at Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, March 2026.
Written psychosomatic expressions of women’s pain pathologised as ‘hysteric’.
'Of the womb' typeface appearing to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.
‘Lessen the Suffering’ and ‘Diseases’ — both show examples of typefaces that are categorised as ‘gothic’. These were the earliest typefaces, and they were based on hand-written forms which had been developed before the invention of printing. The type of the first printed books was derived from a formal book hand written with a minimum of curves; the letters are upright, narrow and angular, standing on crooked feet and the ascending and descending strokes are often decorated with barbs or thorns (take a look at the lowercase ‘h’ as an example of a barb or thorn).
There were different forms of Gothic, formally known ‘Blackletter‘ — early German form, seldom seen after the fifteenth century; and a late-fifteenth-century French form which as used by English printers throughout the hand-press period (up to the end of the (1450-1800). Although these typefaces — to our eyes — are difficult to read, they had the advance of being highly economic, that is you could fit a lot of characters, and therefore words, onto a page. This was important when paper was so expensive.