Art, Body, and Transformation: The therapeutic work of Hannah Wilke
- Loredana Denicola
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 2
Among the artists who have truly struck me, a special mention goes to Hannah Wilke, whose work brilliantly intertwines art and therapy. Wilke explores the body, femininity, and vulnerability, transforming painful experiences and personal crises into creative and liberating acts.
Her performances, intense and physically engaging, do not offer clinical healing, but open a symbolic path: pain, fragility, and illness become tools to redefine the body and identity. In a world that often separates suffering from creativity, Wilke shows us how art can be a space for introspection, resilience, and emotional transformation, opening new perspectives on how to live, feel, and create.
Through performances, folded sculptures, and photographic self-presentations, she makes visible aspects of life that are often ignored or repressed. Her work invites viewers to confront their own corporeality, emotions, and limitations, turning gesture, repetition, and the transformation of materials into a symbolic elaboration of pain and human fragility. In this sense, Wilke’s art is not merely self-expression, but a tool for reflection, liberation, and strength.
To live one’s life as art, rather than for art, brings advantages beyond creativity itself: it transforms difficult experiences into awareness, beauty, and vitality. Wilke’s work remains a powerful testament to the generative and relational potential of art.
Hannah Wilke developed a practice in which the boundaries between herself and her art dissolved.
“I become my art, my art becomes me,” she wrote in a Letter to Women Artists in 1975, and in a 1986 interview, she declared: “I have transformed myself into a work of art” and “my whole life is a work of art.” She explained that she made art in order “to have life all around.”
If art can invite life as a force within a single existence, then life becomes art enriched by more art, which brings more life, and so on in an exponential, combinatory process.
This vitality - a vitality that suggests something like liberation, at a historical moment when many were seeking to define the meaning of the word “life” - is the prevailing tone in Wilke’s work, even when she was caring for her mother during breast cancer treatment, and later when confronting her own death from lymphoma at the age of fifty-two.
“Art,” Wilke said, “is for the good of life.”
By contrast, the submission to art - the mythical, romantic, and often disappointing approach of the self-sacrificing artist - is notoriously known for making the practice of art itself the centre of life’s suffering.
Life as art holds greater promise.
To live as art always means investigating the strangeness of pleasure. A life practice integrated with an artistic practice has the power to intensify meaning, even during life’s crises - those almost inevitable experiences of grief, illness, and pain.
The vitality in art, the art in life - each carries the potential to expand and to confront contradictions and uncertainties, including those sharpened by one’s own historical moment.
During Wilke’s lifetime - from 1940 to 1993 - both art and life were shaken by changes, one of the most decisive being the intervention of feminism.
If vitality was the tonal constant of Wilke’s work, her preferred material was the gesture - and the dominant gesture of her art in the 1970s was the fold.
From the beginning of her practice, Wilke worked with clay to create vessel-like forms with genital references. Yet with the first folded pieces in the early 1970s she discovered an action that balanced the shapes she was making, so that the various materials she employed- initially terracotta, later chewing gum, erasers, rubber, and others - became a proliferating register of an obsessive act.
Folding is the gestural equivalent of paradox: it takes what has neither inside nor outside and, without changing its substance, gives it both. Before a flat plane is folded, we know it as surface, superficial, exposed.
Once folded, that same material becomes a semi-secret: the fold alerts us to possibilities once hidden within the surface. A folded plane offers points of access where we can grasp the once-superficial surface in relation to depth. The substance of the material does not change, but each folded plane acquires more difference from the next than any flat plane ever could. Our experience of the material is thus unsettled by both the fold and its multiplicity and uniqueness.
When something is folded - as in Wilke’s vulva-like repetitions- it is transformed again and again by the gesture. Desire, in the sense of curiosity, wonder, adventure, mischief is activated. What was once superficial and familiar becomes mysterious and profound.
Equally important in Wilke’s work is that the fold is tied to feminised labour, what was once regarded as “women’s work”: doing the laundry, changing nappies, kneading dough.
The efficiency of the fold, repeated constantly, mirrors the continuity of care work while simultaneously creating mystery out of superficiality, three-dimensional form out of apparent flatness.
Folding remains for many of us an ordinary aspect of care for ourselves and others - folding towels, sheets, documents - but Wilke performs it with precision and insistence, illuminating the paradoxical nature of the gesture. The fold thus becomes a moment of revelation, a reality once hidden within the banality of daily life - both in the materials themselves and in our relations with others.
“Freely Disposed, Vulnerably Exposed”
Among the folded sculptures at the Pulitzer, one that stands out is Elective Affinities (1978), named after Goethe’s 1809 novel. Four low wooden platforms display white porcelain objects shaped like vulvas, each folded individually and arranged in grids that grow larger (3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6).
Goethe’s novel, one of Wilke’s favourites, reflects a life lived with care and intention, where women often carry the emotional and practical weight of running the household and supporting cultural progress, sometimes compensating for male shortcomings.
The porcelain adds a tension between material and meaning, refinement and passion, ideals of femininity and human reality. Even though the objects are folded into vulva-like forms, the porcelain still echoes the softness and pliability of the original material Wilke worked with.
Wilke also explored self-portraiture, often showing herself nude or partially nude in series like S.O.S. (Starification Object Series) (1974–82). In the photos, her body is covered in chewing gum “scars,” which poke fun at beauty ideals and the commercialisation of the female body, while also questioning how women are represented.
For Wilke, nudity was “synonymous with universality,” a way to explore the body in all its aspects: desire, pleasure, pain, illness, and even death. In later works like Intra-Venus (1991–93), created while she was being treated for lymphoma, she continued to use her body as a medium, showing resilience, humour, and presence even in the face of serious illness.
For Wilke, living one’s life as art did not mean simply producing artworks, but rather integrating every daily action into an artistic gesture, transforming experience itself into creative expression.
Gesture thus became a universal language - wordless, yet capable of communicating emotions, intentions, and states of being.
Each gesture, however simple or repetitive, carries value and meaning: folding, shaping, moving the body, or enacting small everyday acts become symbols of attention, care, and awareness.
Repetition is not monotonous but cumulative, building bodily memory and a sense of continuity that helps define individual identity.
Wilke’s art demonstrates that living as art means accepting instability and the constant transformation of existence: being flexible, open to oneself and others, capable of adaptation and renewal. In this process, art is not separated from life but becomes its guiding force: helping to process emotions, confront challenges, and bring meaning even to moments of suffering or crisis.
Living as art thus becomes an act of freedom, a way of escaping conventions and imposed limits, turning daily life into a creative and meaningful experience in which every gesture contributes to the construction of the self and one’s relation to the world.
Wilke’s art carries a profound therapeutic function - for herself and for those who encounter it. She transformed painful and difficult experiences - her mother’s illness, her own lymphoma, the social pressures on the female body, and the reality of objectification - into performances, sculptures, and photographs.
Through repetitive gestures, shaped materials, and the representation of her own body, she worked through emotions such as fear, anger, vulnerability, and loss, translating them into forms that enabled awareness and creative strength.
Viewers are invited into a similar process: pain, symbolically and poetically expressed, becomes comprehensible and shareable, and the creative transformation of difficulty teaches that even the most traumatic experiences can be converted into awareness, beauty, and emotional resilience.
In this sense, Wilke’s art operates as a form of art therapy, capable of surfacing deep emotions, fostering reflection, and offering symbolic tools for the elaboration of trauma.
by Loredana
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