CALL FOR ARTISTS: Two Reasons Heart Health Project (in collaboration with Heart Charged)

After sharing various posts from STARS during Arrythmia Week 2023 on Instagram I connected with Hannah and Bethany Keime from Heart Charged. Both sisters are heart warriors with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). We jumped on a Zoom call (after finding a time that worked cross continents) and came up with an idea to work on raising awareness of heart conditions together.

Who are we recruiting?

If you’d like to contribute to this project we’d love to hear from you. We’re looking for:

Artists: to create the artworks to share, open to all media including drawing, painting, video and performance. Read through the brief below and get in touch.
Curators: to help organise the works, venue and curation process.
Medics: if you’re a health professional working to heal hearts drop us a line. We’ll take heart diagrams, ECG printouts, explanatory drawings etc. Get in touch.
Venues: happy to host an exhibition or event? Get in touch.

ARTIST BRIEF

Hannah & Bethany Keime of Heart Charged, USA and UK artist Charlie Kirkham want to raise awareness of undiagnosed heart conditions and the decreased survival rates for women. They decided to collaborate after meeting on Instagram through posting about their lives with invisible disabilities in June 2023. Hannah and Bethany both have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and Charlie has arrythmia (F/EAT & pRBBB).

After chatting about Hannah & Bethany’s #FlashTheBoob campaign (calling for bystanders to perform CPR on women), Charlie thought how strange it is that we’re surrounded by images of female nudity, but women are dying because people are scared to show boobs. What would happen if all those reclining nudes needed CPR? That’s how this project was born.

What do I do next?

Pick one of the reference images below*
Let Charlie know via email or DM which image you’re working on
Create your version of the nude with AED (defibrillator) pads attached, see image above for placement
You can work in whatever medium you want to and any size up to 2m/6.5ft (height&width)
Once you’ve finished send a high resolution image labelled as “ArtistName_Title_Medium_Size” to Charlie include your social media tag and website so we can link back to you

*this is not an exhaustive list so if you have an alternative reference image you think would work send it over.

REFERENCE IMAGES