It must be nice to spend all day in bed | Hazel Julian

This exhibition brings together photographic work by Hazel Julian, captured from the viewpoints chronic illness has carved into her life: her bed at home, the hospital bed, and the small church near her parents’ house. The installation emerges from a friendship sustained through voice notes and messages—a form of Crip communication that shapes the exhibition as much as the images themselves. Nestled into the chapel of a former hospital, we invite visitors into this dialogue: reflections on sick beds and hospital chapels, on who is allowed to be ill, and on the old spectres of hysteria, moral failure, and feminine excess that still cling to perceptions of being unwell. These works return, again and again, to the exhaustion of being disbelieved and dismissed—to being, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Hazel’s photographs trace the intimate spaces where chronic illness is inhabited, exploring how we continue to live, create, and make meaning within the warping, looping, stretching temporality of crip time. “Now, time is measured in the position of shadows on the wall seen from the vantage point of my bed,” Mira Brunner wrote, and Hazel’s images move within that same register. The title draws from the refrain familiar to many Sick people: “it must be nice to spend all day in bed,” drawn from Alice Hattrick’s ‘Ill Feelings’. This exhibition stands as a testament to the creative, relational, and political work that happens from bed—a time‑honoured disabled practice, in which the bed becomes an island of attention, resistance, and care.