McGill Pain Questionnaire

Shelving objective measures of pain

Pain is an enigmatic concept. It is obscurely wrapped up in an intricate web of perception, emotions, memories, cognition, and social interaction. It is also accompanied by experiences of anxiety, desperation, and shame—aspects that people often overlook. McGill Pain Questionnaire visually explores artist Eugenie Lee’s illness and visceral pain resulting from endometriosis and adenomyosis. By combining the McGill Pain Questionnaire, an objective pain measuring tool, with subjective lived experience, Lee has created a self-portrait installation. The exhibit reflects upon the tension between the clinical system that is ultimately removed from its subject, and the human experience that is built through layers of social interactions, emotions, and memories of lived experience.

The filing cabinets in the exhibit represent how medical systems observe, measure, and attempt to categorise patients’ subjective experiences. Each of the unopenable drawers is labelled with adjectives drawn from the questionnaire. To augment these pain adjectives, Lee incorporates viewing windows as visual metaphors and similes that become ‘evidence’ of the pain.

Medium: Video, Audio and Images

Year: 2012

The original McGill Pain Questionnaire upon which the exhibit is based.

Process sketches created during the development of the exhibit.

Production of the physical installation of the McGill Pain Questionnaire.

Team

Eugenie Lee

Artist

Eugenie Lee is a Korean-Australian interdisciplinary artist with a conceptual focus on persistent pain. She investigates pain-related perceptions and experiences through various media and technologies that often stem from collaborations with pain scientists and researchers which includes installations, paintings, and participatory interactive performance.
Notable curatorial exhibitions include the Big Anxiety Festival at UNSW (2019), MOD.IFY: It’s not what you know at Museum Of Discovery (MOD.) (2018), and The Patient: The Medical Subject in Contemporary Art (2016-18). Eugenie is a recipient of major grants and residency awards in Australia and graduated with Honours from Sydney College of the Arts in Australia 2012.