Twilight and The Shadow's Edge are two photographic series/exhibitions which seek to illuminate the unseen aspects of the medicalised end-of-life experience and the impacts of absent voluntary assisted dying laws in Queensland, Australia, through the agency of documentary practice. Coupled with an exegesis, the series are outcomes of a health-related, non-clinical, arts-based practice-led research project which attempt to deepen viewer's understandings of contemporary illness, death and dying in distinctly aesthetic and affective terms. The research also investigates the development of an appropriate visual language that deploys institutional attitude and a clinical aesthetic as rhetorical devices, co-opting and subsequently thwarting the clinical gaze of medicine to generate deferred and complex affects. These affects orbit themes of loss, mortality, uncertainty, liminality and fragmented or disrupted temporalities.

Central to this research is a qualification and emphasis on the profound entanglement between illness, photography, medicine and death. I situate the outcomes within the context of discourse and practice that have grappled with these intersections. The project acknowledges photography's capacity to cause further 'injury' in the representation of vulnerable subjects and discuss strategies to help its circumvention.

The research extrapolates the thinking of Michel Foucault who positions contemporary biomedicine as a hegemonic institution of care that not only restores health but also crucially reconfigures or 'governs' the body.1 Medicine has greatly extended our lives but also complicated and protracted the ways it draws to a close. The research explores what it means, and how it feels, to live in the long shadow of serious illness and medical management as diminishment and darkness nears.