Francesca Vale

Frankie Vale is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, funded by Victoria’s Secret. She is currently in the final year of her doctoral project, which uses a blended scholarly and practice-based approach to consider the representation of breast cancer surgery in art and curation. Frankie is a lived experience researcher who had a risk-reducing mastectomy and reconstruction in 2023, which led her to consider the state of breast cancer surgery representation and its relationship to embodied knowledge. Her research blends scholarly and practice-based lines of enquiry, with a survey of breast cancer representation in art since 1882, followed by a curatorial project. Currently in her practice she is running the Empowered Journeys project, a co-curatorial exploration with people who have had breast cancer surgery to produce artworks and pieces of text based on their lived experience. These artworks will go into an exhibition that will consider representation and investigate how curation and creativity can challenge the narratives that society projects onto post-surgery bodies. Her research will propose a framework for the display and visibility of the post-breast cancer surgery body, which could be adapted for other marginalised bodies in the future.

 

 

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