Last year, I graduated with a First Class degree with Honours in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University!

I had my first baby when I was 19, I’d had a tough few years and university wasn’t on the cards before I got pregnant, but once I was becoming a mother, I knew further education would be a long way down the line, if ever! (Obviously for lots of people they parent and study side by side and bloody well done to them, it just wasn’t for me!) I then had two more babies and focused on being a mum.

As the kids grew older, I had various weird and wonderful jobs. (I will do a post about my varied career or you can have a peek at a post I did recently on linked in about the difficulty in finding work as a disabled woman) I never thought university could be an option for me, I had left school with decent GCSE’s but then attempted college and A-levels twice, leaving each time as I was unhoused and its hard to study when you’re not sure where you are sleeping. But as life moved on, I was happy, I was working and life felt good, I had a job working for Scope, the disability charity, that I LOVED and I also had my own radio show on BBC Radio Sheffield.

Then in early 2020, I was facing another major surgery, it was a big one and would need a long recovery, I made the decision to leave Scope and headed into hospital. I was incredibly unwell after the op, my kidneys failed and I was in and out of hospital. I planned to start working for my husband Timm and our photography studio, working as studio manager. Then as we all know, Covid hit. I was classed as clinically vulnerable and very scared, and then the BBC decided to cull all double headed shows to reduce the risks for people working in the studios. The photography studio had to close down and suddenly, I had no job at all and was scared to leave the house!

One day during the long lockdowns, I said to Timm “If I won the lottery, I would go to university”, he laughed and asked what I would study, I told him Fine Art and he asked why would we need a lottery win to do that, I ventured that I couldn’t not work and bring in money and that university seemed like a luxury. He thought for a while and then said that we had no work, that the world was closed down and we had no idea what life would bring us, that we had learnt that life can be cut short and we need to seize the day! Within a week, I had enrolled on my course to start (online) a few weeks later! I had enough life skills and experience to overcome the lack of A-levels and I was heading for art school! Not long after, Timm decided to enrol too and he would begin a Film Production degree at the same time. We applied for student finance and away we went!

Though it was tough heading into education after so many years and being 39 when I started and one of the oldest people on my course, I loved it. I adored learning, reading, exploring and discovering. Creating and making and thinking outside the box was a joy. And though there were times where I worried I wasn’t good enough, after three years and meeting some of the greatest people, after three years I graduated with a first class degree with honours.

In my third year, I started the year strong, with great ideas of my final exhibition. All my art practice had been around accessibility, I had created photography projects around the feeling of being bound and trapped by chronic illness, I had exhibitions of my work highlighting the inaccessibility of hanging heights in galleries and my third year project was to look at the art spaces I could not enter in a wheelchair. But it wasn’t to be.

I began to feel quite unwell, I was in a lot of pain and unable to eat much. I lost two stone in 6 weeks and ended up in hospital, my bowel was trapped in a hernia and I couldnt digest food, I was malnourished and starving to death. I was admitted to hospital in November and put on a PICC line and TPN feeding, where nutrition goes straight into the arteries around the heart and bypasses the stomach and bowel, this was for a month until I was strong enough to survive a surgery to fix the trapped bowel and hernia. I have written about this on another blog and so I won’t go into too much detail, but that surgery did not go well and after being taken back to the ward, my bowel perforated and I developed Sepsis. I was rushed back into surgery and woke up days later in ICU after having been placed in a coma. I was in hospital for another month after that, spending Christmas and new year in hospital, I came home in January, two months after I was admitted.

I came home with a PICC line and needed daily IV antibiotics to counter the sepsis and infections raging in my body. I felt incredible unwell all the time, I had lost another stone and a half and had massive muscle wastage, I could barely stand. My PICC line and daily antibiotics carried on for another 4 or 5 months, life was the inside of my bedroom.

During this time, my tutors told me I could repeat the year, that it was no problem and to rest and recover. But I knew that I needed something to keep me going, I had my incredible husband, kids and friends of course, but I needed something that was MINE and mine alone. And so I kept up studying, kept making art, kept my brain active, my amazing tutor would FaceTime me in hospital, all the while reminding me to take it easy and take my time, but respecting my decision to keep working. I wrote a little about support for disabled students and DSA on a blog here.

Obviously my original plans, that included large scale sculptures, performance art and film were out of the question. So I worked with what I had.

I looked around my hospital bed, in a private room I was kept separate due to getting a hospital acquired infection, anyone who entered the room had to wear full PPE, a gown, mask, gloves and face screen. I had very little to work with! I had six drains in my body, they were kept in for so long, taken out, replaced, more added, some taken away. I had my stoma bag, I had NG tube and so many wires and tubes in and out of my skin and body, I had the PICC line that had kept me alive for months. And I became intrigued by the array of colours that were coming out of my body. You think it’s just blood, piss and shit, but then these drains were pulling crazy coloured fluids from me, the NG tube spouted bright green/yellow bile, the colours were both disgusting, but also beautiful. And so I photographed the bags of coloured fluids, thinking of them as artists medium. Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to paint with them! But I did get a Nix colour sensor so I could find out more about these colours, and from there I created some colour palette art works of the colours of my body and named them Samtones.

I also created a diary out of the small paper cups that my pills were delivered to my bedside in every day, the words and images that filled my head were squirrelled away into these disposable cups that I flattened and made into a book.

I wrote my Manual for Practice, the several thousand words about my art practice, academia and theory behind my work, handed it all in, hung my exhibition, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best!

And last year I did it! I graduated!

Not one second of it came easy, I had to work my arse off for this, I fought so hard to keep going through incredible pain and fear, through being bed bound for months, through foggy heads and drugged up brains, I read, I wrote, I created and I did it. I got my degree. First Class with honours in Fine Art! With Timm and all my bambinos by my side!!

And the icing on the cake was that Timm completed his Film degree despite being a full time carer, having to learn how to give IV meds, visiting me in hospital for 12 hours a day, having to work, care for the house, kids and pets and do it all alone! He got a First class degree with honours in Film Production and I couldn’t be prouder of of both.

Never give up on your dreams, just keep swimming and fight for what you want in life!

Peace and love

Sam x