Julie de Ruijter

Endometriosis is a chronic illness affecting approximately one in ten women and people with a uterus. Yet despite its prevalence, it remains largely invisible, with an average diagnostic delay of around seven years.

In this project, I navigate the psychological, emotional, and physical realities of this chronic illness, and what it means to inhabit a body that is frequently rendered invisible. Informed by lived experience and historical research into gender inequality in healthcare, the work explores how women’s pain and bodily experiences have been overlooked, underdiagnosed, and under-researched. Through visual strategies, it seeks to make the invisible realities of endometriosis perceptible.

This project emerges from my own experience as a patient, intertwined with my roles as a visual artist and psychologist. Positions that continually shape how I experience, question, and give form to this research.

Wayfaring — inspired by British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s idea that knowledge is formed through movement and direct engagement with the world rather than from a fixed point of observation — informs an important part of my practice. This took form through a series of walks during which I photographed intuitively, responding to sensory stimuli instead of cognitive concepts. Through this process, I sought to create a counter-archive to the MRI images of my body that I did not recognize myself in, an archive that could represent the lived and embodied realities of this condition beyond clinical imagery alone. These photographs do not document external reality; they seek to render an inner landscape visible and offer a visual language for experiences that often resist words.

In this installation — part of an ongoing work in progress — these photographs are presented on X-ray light boxes alongside MRI scans of my body. Diagnostic images from the medical system are placed in dialogue with photographs created while wayfaring, bringing clinical and embodied forms of knowledge together. As a visitor, you are invited to participate in this process by using the photographs to compose your own visual responses and narratives through guided prompts.

This is not only a conversation about endometriosis. It is also a starting point for a broader dialogue about visibility, recognition, and care from multiple perspectives. The installation creates a space where everyone is welcome, with the intention of enabling people to feel heard and seen. In this way, the personal becomes part of a shared language and, perhaps, a small step towards change.