Guilherme Duarte da Silva​

Artist Statement

I discovered osteosarcoma after my first year studying Art and Design. When treatment ended, I found myself staring at a drawer full of empty medication blister packs. They felt like traces of a period of life that had changed me completely. With my leg permanently altered by surgery, I created a sculpture from those materials. At the time, it was not intended for exhibition. It was simply a way to process what had happened.
A year later, I was diagnosed with leukemia.

The following three years were marked by hospital admissions, surgeries, medications, and the relentless routine of treatment. During that time, I could not make art. My only goal was to get through each day and complete treatment as safely as possible. The experience consumed everything. There was little room for creativity, reflection, or even a sense of self beyond being a patient.

Only after treatment ended did I begin to understand what those years had meant. Looking back on six years spent moving between hospital rooms, operating theaters, outpatient clinics, and home, I realized that I needed to find a way to give form to those experiences. Art became the space where I could revisit them, not to recreate suffering, but to understand it.

Returning to university and later pursuing postgraduate studies in Visual Arts helped me reconnect with parts of myself that had been dormant. Making art allowed me to reclaim a sense of subjectivity that illness had gradually eroded. It felt as if something was growing again in places where I had assumed nothing could survive.

Today, my artistic practice is deeply informed by my experience with cancer. I am interested in the relationships between the body, illness, memory, and transformation. I explore how medical treatments leave traces not only on the body but also on identity, perception, and the ways we relate to the world. My own body has become both a source of inquiry and a site of memory.

To the scientists, researchers, and healthcare professionals working on cancer treatments: thank you. The treatments I received were physically and emotionally demanding, but they also made my life possible. Because of their work, I am here today, making art, continuing my education, and imagining a future.

This artwork is part of that ongoing process. It is not only about illness. It is also about survival, adaptation, and the unexpected ways that meaning can emerge from experiences we never would have chosen.