It must be nice to spend all day in bed, Grand Hospice (2026)
It must be nice to spend all day in bed brings together photographic works by Hazel Julian, captured from the viewpoints chronic illness inhabits: her bed at home, the hospital bed, and the church near her parents’ house. The installation emerges from fifteen years of friendship between Hazel and curator Bethan Burnside, a relationship sustained through voice notes and messages exchanged from their respective beds—a form of Crip* communication that shape the exhibition as much as the images themselves.
Nestled into the chapel of a former hospital, we invite visitors into this dialogue: reflections on sick beds and hospital chapels, on who is allowed to be ill, and on the spectres of hysteria, moral failure, and feminine excess that cling to perceptions of chronic illness. These works return, again and again, to the exhaustion of being disbelieved and dismissed—to being, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Hazel’s photographs trace the intimate spaces where chronic illness manifests, exploring how we continue to live, create, and make meaning within the warping, looping, stretching temporality of crip time. “Now, time is measured in the position of shadows on the wall seen from the vantage point of my bed,” Mira Brunner writes, and Hazel’s images move within that same register.
The title echoes the refrain all too familiar to people who are unwell: “it must be nice to spend all day in bed,” a line drawn from Alice Hattrick’s book Ill Feelings. The exhibition foregrounds the relational, and political work that takes place from bed, a long‑standing disabled practice in which the bed functions as an island of attention, resistance, and care.
*Crip is a reclaimed disability-justice term used by some disabled people as an expression of pride, political identity, and resistance to ableism.
Artist: Hazel Julian.
Sound composition by George Dhauw.
Produced by Miranda Pastor.
Photography by Julien Jonas.
