The experience of being diagnosed and living with cancer is a life-changing one that affects over 2 million people in the UK every year. As the disease touches more lives than ever before, having conversations about cancer and hearing the voices of individuals impacted by the disease has never been more important.
Silent Stories, comprising five striking glass sculptures of patients being treated for neck and throat cancer and accompanied by a woven soundscape of their voices, opens up this conversation.

Katie: For Silent Stories, you created glass busts from plaster casts used during radiotherapy treatments. What led you to transform these medical artefacts into art?
Katharine: It all started from a very personal place. My father had a small skin cancer on his nose, and after his radiotherapy, he came home one day with this clear shell of just his face, almost like a mask. He kept it and gave it to me, thinking I might find it interesting, and I did. I was struck by its presence, by what it represented. That led me to explore the process further, speaking to hospitals and discovering how these plaster casts were made and used. It fascinated me how these objects were functional yet so deeply personal, as silent witnesses to a moment of vulnerability and survival.
During my enquiries I was fortunate to meet an NHS technician called Nadia at Southend Hospital who worked in their radiotherapy mould making room. She was very keen to help highlight head and neck cancer and treatment – as radiotherapy was considered a ‘Cinderella’ story at the time and wasn’t well known. She helped me source these moulds working with the consent of the patients.
Katie: The fragility and transparency of glass in your sculptures can evoke powerful emotions. How do these material choices reflect the experiences of cancer patients? What was the process of making them?
Katharine: Glass is the perfect metaphor for the fragility of life. It’s strong yet vulnerable, can be clear or opaque but also refractive and reflective. The material allows you to see through it, presenting both the surface and the interior simultaneously, just as illness and treatment affect both the face we present to the world and our hidden side. It’s also already used in many medical procedures and has a membrane-like quality, and you can manipulate it like a veil. For the busts, I made it so that you can look inside and almost see that person thinking or projecting their inner selves.
To make the busts, I used the traditional lost wax process which is also used in casting bronzes.

Katie: Could you share the process of collaborating with patients and NHS staff for this project?
Katharine: It was incredibly humbling. Initially in 2010, I had no direct contact with the patients because everything was anonymised. I only had their first names and masks which I numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. So, I knew their name and number and I knew their face incredibly well, which felt intimate but distant and one-dimensional. Nadia was the bridge between me and the patients, handling their casting process with such care and compassion and putting the patients at ease. She was extraordinary and ten years later arranged introductions with some of them who wanted to participate with the soundscape addition to the original installation.
When I finally met them, it changed everything and made the piece feel whole. I visited their homes, and we talked about their experiences, their fears, their resilience. They were so generous with their stories, even though reliving those moments must’ve been difficult. Their bravery was extraordinary, and the professionalism of the NHS was fantastic.

Katie: The installation includes a specially commissioned soundscape featuring patients’ memories. How does integrating audio elements enhance the narrative of Silent Stories?
Katharine: The soundscape was carefully crafted to weave together the voices of the patients I met, creating a rhythmic, poetic narrative. I structured it around a few key themes – diagnosis, the casting process, medical treatment, aftercare, and reflections on survival – layering different voices to maintain balance. During editing, I highlighted repeated words and phrases the patients would use: for example Lee would say how he didn’t want his family to worry, and June would mention singing the song The wonder of you as a way of calming herself during the treatments. I’d ask them to repeat these phrases several times in varying tones to create a natural ebb and flow. The result is not just a straightforward interview but a long, woven poem of experiences, light and dark, fear and hope, hopefully immersing the listener in the deeply personal yet universal journey of cancer treatment.
Katie: Your work often intersects with science and medicine. How has your collaboration with the scientific community shaped your artistic approach, particularly with Silent Stories?
Katharine: I’m drawn to revealing the hidden side of life, whether that’s the anatomy of the body, the workings of the mind, or, in this case, the medical processes and breakthroughs that shape lives. Silent Stories is about making those unseen experiences visible. Science and medicine provide me with endlessly fascinating ideas to explore, but they also shape how I think about material and form. In 2002, I was using MRI images of my brain and laser etching them into glass for example, but I also work with historians and academics too.
Scientists spend their lives exploring things, asking how things work and what they can do with a thing, and if can it help people. For example, the scientists featured in Cancer Revolution: Science, innovation and hope were working towards a goal of seeing cancer cured one day and making peoples’ lives a little bit better with innovations and breakthroughs. I think this investigatory mindset is also why scientists and artists can work well together because fundamentally it’s down to the question, ‘if I do this, what happens?’
Katie: Silent Stories is now a permanent part of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries. What message or reflection do you hope visitors will take away from your installation?
Katharine: I would like visitors to feel a sense of hope and offer a moment of reflection on vulnerability and on survival. Silent Stories brings something huge, like cancer, down to a personal, human level and is rooted in real people’s experiences. I am also pleased that I have captured two men speaking in the soundscape who are talking about their emotions, as you don’t often hear that in the cancer narrative. More than anything, I would like visitors to reflect on how lucky we are to have modern medicine. We live in the 21st century, and people are living with cancer and surviving longer. I want visitors to feel awe at the bravery of those very ordinary human beings who have gone through treatment and to recognise the universality of these emotions – we can all relate to them.

Katie: Your broader body of work explores themes of the body and anatomy. Looking ahead, are there any new projects or themes you’re eager to explore that continue to bridge the gap between art, medicine, and personal narratives?
Katharine: I’m fascinated by the rituals of life, narratives of experience, why we’re here and what makes up our human spirit. So, whilst I will continue to reveal the hidden worlds within us, perhaps but not anatomically as such, instead looking at the idea of the human soul. I’m also interested in archaeology, peeling away the layers of earth beneath us, the hidden worlds revealed over time.
Last August I exhibited a work in Scotland called Traces of Living in exhibition What Remains by Bullseye Projects with soundscape by Freddie Graham that runs until March 2026. It was inspired by the Neolithic remains in the wild landscape of Caithness. I’m also currently showing a work called River of Life in the Daejeon Museum of Art show Magnum Opus, Daejeon Art and Science Biennale, in South Korea. This investigates ecology and the organisms at the bottom of the food chain, which we destroy at our peril. One other exciting area I’m working on is my first monograph, which I hope will come out in the next year.
Katie: Is there anything else you would like to share about the artwork?
Katharine: I just want to thank and acknowledge the incredible bravery of the patients who put their trust in me and shared their stories. This work wouldn’t exist without them. Silent Stories is a tribute to their resilience, but it’s also a reminder of how universal these experiences are. We all face moments of vulnerability, of uncertainty, of fear, but we also find ways to move forward. I hope the piece speaks to that delicate balance between fragility and strength. The glass sculptures may seem fragile, but they endure, just as these individuals have. And just as medicine evolves, so too does our understanding of what it means to survive.
Silent Stories was acquired by the Science Museum Group as part of the ‘Collecting Experiences of Cancer’ project launched in 2020 which focusses on enhancing the representation of the profound and common disease experience, inviting patients, medics and researchers to suggest objects to collect.
Located in Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, Silent Stories joins the museum’s art collection and other artworks on free public display in Medicine including bronze sculptures by Eleanor Crook and Marc Quinn, ceramic pharmacy jar by Grayson Perry, disease-transmission-inspired aerial installation by Studio Roso, and photographic portrait series by Siân Davey.
Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries are the largest medicine galleries in the world. Featuring three thousand objects and covering an area equivalent to 1,500 hospital beds, it marks its fifth year in 2025.