My work—in particular these recent watercolors (the 'Remnant' series)—is a response to my experiences throughout the past three years in medical school. As an artist, I found myself drawn to all the images included in my lectures, and then on the wards I found myself even more deeply drawn to the radiology reading rooms throughout the hospital. I became interested in how radiographs serve as distilled moments of a human narrative, an illness experience in greyscale. It felt both incredibly elegant but also painfully brief to me. So I turned to my studio to investigate my personal relationship to these images. I wanted to turn off the "objective" answers we often look for in medical images I was being trained to find as a medical student and instead turn on a more emotional response to the grey shapes and shadows that I collected from the wards. Each piece's composition references actual images I saw of my patients. I focused on shapes and transparencies that interested me, choosing to lean into abstraction as a way to acknowledge the depth and what I perceived as an "uncapturability" of everything in a medical narrative.

I am applying to radiology residencies and know my future career will involve shifting constantly between the objective, medical evidence in images and the emotional, subjective nature of what an image means to a patient in their illness journey. A CT scan, MRI or chest X-ray can be a punctuating event for any patient, and I use my art practice to remind myself of that intimate moment of clarity (one I personally experienced when a close family member of mine was unexpectedly hospitalized during my second year of medical school and all of my family's hopes seemed to hinge on the results of a single brain MRI).

These pieces all speak to the focus of the Intima journal in that they aim to introduce tenderness, uncertainty and empathy to the medical radiologic image, an object in medicine that is usually otherwise seen as cold and clinical. I am interested in the grey areas, the overlaps and the blurry edges that continually humble me both as a future physician and an artist.

© Remnant Series by Tia Forsman Spring 2022 Intima