Emily Haworth - Postgraduate student / Research Assistant, Newcastle University Centre for Cancer
A Creative Way to Start Conversations on Rethinking Rural
The Picture This: Someone Like Me is a new exhibition at The Great North Museum: Hancock, which brought together PhD students from across Newcastle university to showcase their research through creative arts. I was fortunate enough to be selected to be part of the cohort, where I got to develop skills and represent my research on rural breast cancer pathways and experiences, and display them to the public.
What is my PhD about?
I am currently in the first year of my PhD, funded by Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Programme ESRC studentship, and I’m based within the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University. My PhD explores the experiences of rural breast cancer patients, right across their pathways, from symptom appraisal and diagnosis through to treatment, survival and follow-up care. It has been shown for a long time that, globally, rural cancer patients often face worse survival outcomes than urban patients.
Much of the research so far comes from the USA and Australia which have very different rural contexts and healthcare systems than we have in the UK. It’s really important that we understand the experiences and challenges that rural breast cancer patients face in the UK, to enable us to identify the problems that could be impacting breast cancer survival.
What is the Picture This: Someone Like Me project?
The Picture This: Someone Like Me project was an opportunity for PhD students to communicate their research through artwork to the general public. We attended a full training day, led by Peter Moore Fuller from Infohackit, which taught us the basics of using the Affinity software, followed by online webinars to improve our skills further. Although the software was initially quite daunting to use, with practice, and a lot of trial and error, I started to really enjoy the process.
I loved the opportunity to do something a bit different and creative. So much of my PhD involves reading and writing academic literature, data analysis and just generally very academic, text-based tasks. This project allowed me to consider my research in a different light and really helped me to take a step back, thinking about what was important for me, and vitally the people the research is about and for.
The project provided a fantastic opportunity to build my confidence and skills in sharing my research to a wider audience than what I am normally used to. The ultimate goal was to create a single picture that conceptualised my research which would go on display in the Great North Museum: Hancock.
The process encouraged me to really think about who would be looking my artwork, how I wanted to portray “my research” and how I could potentially inspire adults and children to get involved with research in the future.
What does my artwork represent?
My artwork represents the diversity that exists within, and between, rural communities. Rural areas are often treated as though they are all the same, yet they are made up of people with very different backgrounds, circumstances and experiences. Grouping all rural communities together, as so often happens in policy, can overlook many of the factors that shape people’s health and their outcomes after a cancer diagnosis.
In my research, I am particularly interested in how different aspects of a person’s identity and circumstances can influence breast cancer survival. Deprivation, age, ethnicity and employment can all shape a patient’s experiences and outcomes. These factors often intersect, meaning that people’s experiences are influenced by a combination of these characteristics, rather than just one.
The aim of my artwork was therefore to highlight that there is no single “rural patient”. By reflecting the diversity that exists within rural communities, the piece encourages viewers to think about why these differences matter and why it is important for research to consider the complexity of people’s lives when studying cancer survival.
Seeing the artwork on display
I am incredibly proud of seeing my artwork displayed in the Great North Museum: Hancock. Creating this piece had taken a lot of work and effort, so seeing it exhibited in a museum setting felt both rewarding and slightly surreal. When I began my PhD, I never imagined that my research would be represented through a piece of artwork on public display.
The thought of people outside of academia encountering the piece made the experience particularly exciting. Research is often shared through journal articles or conference presentations, which are typically seen by other academics. Having the artwork displayed in a public space means that museum visitors, many of whom may never normally engage with academic research, have the opportunity to see and think about the ideas behind my work.
Why do projects like this matter?
Taking part in the Picture This: Someone Like Me project encouraged me to think about communicating my research in a completely different format than I normally would. As researchers, we are used to sharing our work through a range of scientific channels, but translating my research into a single visual image was a very different challenge.
One of the most difficult parts of the process was reducing my research into one clear idea that could be represented visually. Research is often complex, with many different components, so deciding what the most important message of my work was, required me to step back and think carefully about what I really wanted people to take away from it.
The experience also highlighted how powerful visual communication can be. Images and artwork can convey ideas quickly and evoke an emotional response in a way that academic writing often cannot. Engaging with my research creatively helped me see the value of presenting research in ways that are accessible, relatable and engaging for a wider audience, reaching out further into the communities who we ultimately do our research for.
If you would like to view the artwork created by all the PhD students involved in this project, they will be on display in the Great North Museum: Hancock until January 2027 or they can be viewed online here: www.picturethisresearch.com
I’d like to thank everyone involved who has made this possible, especially Phoebe Lewis and Ainsley Hatt who curated the project and Peter Moore Fuller for training us how to use the software. It also couldn’t have been possible without support form Newcastle University, the Doctoral College at Newcastle University, Affinity by Canva, Great North Museum: Hancock and British Ecological Society.
