Last year, after 20 years in hospital practice as a paediatrician, researcher and clinical geneticist (and a daily witness to lives unravelled), I took six months’ leave to paint full-time. Institutionalised, I needed some time “out of captivity”, in exile from the medical cocoon. The conformity of the hospital system was suffocating me. I found little there to nurture the soul or guard against dampening of the spirit. I needed time to reclaim my individuality. Doctor, heal thyself . . . my prescription, my antidote: art, in hefty doses (Box 1).

I have always been passionate about art, but, as the daughter of immigrant parents, I knew that I was destined for university. Art school was not really an option. I studied music and medicine simultaneously. My internship completed, I promised myself that I would try to incorporate the practice of art into my life as a doctor. I enrolled in a series of night art-classes — in life drawing, watercolour and oil painting, ceramics, leadlighting and mosaics. I fell into training programs in paediatrics and genetics, and then a doctorate. There were stints abroad, working in Houston and Manchester — my time, gobbled up. The study of undergraduate and postgraduate years proved a stark contrast to the creativity of my childhood days.

Childhood. I remember lying on my stomach in the change room at a dance studio in Adelaide on a Saturday morning, busily drawing in my scrapbook as I waited for my ballet class to start — pink stockings, black leotards, hair pulled back; the softness of ballet slippers, shininess of ribbons, smell of sawdust; the big mirrored room; standing at the barre. Equally vivid is my memory of sitting on the laundry floor at home, having unwound balls of Turkish rug wool with my mother and cutting the lengths of richly coloured yarns. Making knots, one by one, I watched with wonder as, from humble threads, a rug magically materialised. Recollections of my mother at “work” in the kitchen — a feast for all the senses. The agility, the deftness, the sheer brilliance of it all dazzled me. All that creativity, bursting at the seams.

I had already been painting seriously for seven years before my six-month sabbatical, and had held several solo exhibitions. I thought of art and medicine, my two great passions, as diametrically opposed — a dichotomy — and looked forward to stuffing my now “free” days full of artistic pursuits (Box 2). The degustation menu included abstract painting, printmaking, sculpture, and a course in professional practice for artists. It was a time of experimentation and renewal, revelation, unpredictability, self-directed learning, unexpected experiences, serendipitous discoveries and precious slivers of enlightenment.

There are many stories I could tell about this time: of being duped by one gallery owner and well treated by another, and of shocking indifference to trespass and violation after some of my paintings were vandalised with shards of glass on Jewish New Year. Here, I will share with you two stories — “Sitting duck” and “Of intimacy and interplay”. Each story, in different ways, shows how my time out of captivity has dispelled forever any misconception about the cleavage between art and medicine.

Sitting duck

Just before preparing for a group exhibition, “Sitting duck”, I was asked to be an expert witness for a family suing a hospital for allegedly negligent care of their son. He had become quadriplegic after surgery for scoliosis. I trawled through reams of medical reports, deeply affected by the accounts of the denouement of an able-bodied teenager to a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic adult. The words, the terminology, the descriptions in the reports were all so sterile, so lacking in compassion. Was I truly part of this fraternity?

Sitting duck. My original intention was to create three sculptures (a new artistic pursuit for me), all light-hearted and frivolous, a celebration of my release from medical confines into the playground of creativity. I had very clear ideas about the works. One was to be a plaster cast of my torso and arms, with paintbrushes in either hand — the brushes of my conductor. The second was to be a hardened, hollow, shell-like, three-dimensional form of my torso modelled from an old T-shirt smothered in oil paint from my wiped brushes. This was to be gaily mounted on a plinth, with all the colours from my palette smeared irreverently on my own outer surface. The third was to be a transparent hollow form of my head, filled with empty tubes of paint, in playful acknowledgement of those six short months when paint, not medicine, was uppermost in my thoughts. However, the final sculptures bore no resemblance to their points of origin. The pieces took control, imposed their own will and directed me, a mere player in their grander scheme.

Unwittingly, the young man’s tragedy became the catalyst for the creation of sculptures that ushered me through a process that paralleled his own. Entrusting myself to strangers, I became my own palette. I was bound in fibreglass. My head was cast, and a mould made from it in a freezing-cold garage in mid-winter (Box 3). Unable to move, see or hear, my own vulnerability sensitised me to that of others. The sculptures developed their own integrity and autonomy. They became about altered and lost senses, loss of the recognisable self, fragility, vulnerability, dissociated states, disembodiment, about ability and disability, and the loss of self-expression. So much for light-heartedness and frivolity! I was outside comfort, outside what I knew. A sitting duck.

I learnt that this is when self-discovery happens. All three pieces had morphed into an exploration of quadriplegia, its inertness, muteness and isolation. Disability, such an indelible mark on life, challenges and makes us rethink our own mortality.

The first sculpture affected me the most. I wanted to mould the T-shirt into a form resembling my torso, harden its external surface, and then remove the inner stuffing. It sounded simple enough. Despite my research at hardware stores and dry cleaners, and a foray to the beach to collect a backpack full of sand (for the stuffing), the garment simply refused to be hardened. All my attempts were thwarted. While battling with the sculpture’s stubbornness, I temporised by sewing closed the neck and sleeve openings, filling the garment with cotton wadding, and arranging it into a shape that I liked. I left it propped on a chair. I was still determined, somehow, to harden the exterior. The next morning, I was confronted by what seemed to be another presence in the room, a palpable living, breathing thing, slumped on its chair, silent and motionless. Keen to photograph it outside in natural light, I unlocked the back door and lifted the torso on its chair.

With the chair raised, the torso tumbled towards me — a moment of astonishing poignancy. I had just identified with quadriplegia in a very intimate way, through an inanimate object. How does that happen?

For days afterwards, the torso was so confronting, and the symbolism so potent, that I could not look at it. I had to move it to another room. (Isn’t that what society does with the disabled?) Each time I tried to reposition it, it defied me and would slump, just like a flaccid quadriplegic. I never did harden the exterior. I left it as it was (Box 4). Affectionately, I named the torso “Slumpy” in an attempt to diffuse the gravity of what it had come to represent. A year later, I still find him unnerving.

What do we do with the parts of ourselves or of someone close to us that, through mental illness, malformation, accident, physical deformity, burns, or paralysis, are no longer recognisable to us? What is it like to look back at your own image and not recognise it (Box 5)? How do we incorporate this into our concept of self?

Of intimacy and interplay

A large part of my practice of genetics involves caring for disabled children and distressed parents. Pattern recognition is quintessential to syndrome diagnosis and requires a highly developed visual memory. It is not uncommon to see children over many years, to review and research, go back and look again, to interrogate the literature and databases, before a correct diagnosis is eventually made. This process, perhaps more so than in other medical disciplines, mirrors the artistic process, where constant questioning and reworking is the norm, and intellectual curiosity is crucial. In retrospect, it seems no accident that I was drawn to this subspecialty, the practice of which rests on many of the same skills that I employ as a practising artist.

Like a metaphor for life, painting is about the search for relatedness and connectivity. I liken the process to standing in front of a mirror, completely naked, all flaws exposed. There is push and pull, tension, uncertainty. Images are lost and refound. Slowly, a painting starts to speak, as paint breathes life into the work. This marks the beginning of a dialogue, after which the painting itself directs my mark-making. From this, intimacy develops. The process echoes the way in which we ourselves form connections with others. Think of the vulnerability of our patients — medicine, too, is steeped in intimacy.

I will never forget my amazement when, on two separate occasions, a woman stood in front of one of my paintings and wept. Then there was the time when a small child, less than two, carried in his mother’s arms, looked at one of my paintings, pointed jubilantly, laughed out loud and exclaimed “woo WOO!”, having recognised a dog in the imagery. Relatedness and resonance. Touching another soul. How can marks on a surface do that?

There are both similarities and contrasts between painting and doctoring. Putting on armour, for example. Sometimes work feels like that: steeling oneself for the day ahead, the bureaucracy, the demands and deadlines, the difficulty of yet another undiagnosed child. Sometimes painting is like that too — hurtling myself at a canvas only to be spat out, ricocheting backwards to the opposite side of the studio, then rolling my sleeves up for the next advance and flinging myself back again, the canvas unrelenting, with me solely accountable.

The clinical practice of medicine demands adherence to rules and regulations; there is a dictated way of thinking, order, structure and logic. Unpredictability and experimentation, factors pivotal to the practice of art, might be seen as the antithesis of medical thinking, yet both are paramount in medical research, where advances often depend on novel ways of seeing and thinking.

The practice of medicine, so laden with pathos, grief, love, regret, sadness, joy, struggle, tragedy, courage and humility, has informed me as an artist from the very beginning. In turn, creativity fosters new and different ways of seeing, broadens my understanding, nurtures me, assuages my soul, deepens my compassion, and heightens my empathy (Box 6). I believe that I am a better doctor for all this. So, for all my years of bearing witness, painting is, for me, part catharsis and part desire to give something back.

On returning to work, my first memory is of a profoundly dry mouth, my heart beating outside my chest as I stand in the corridor, unable to open the door to my office. Back in captivity. “Doctor, schmoctor”, I tell myself, “we are all our own works in progress”.