Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene (2025) is a moving image by Jamila Prowse, responding to the artist’s ongoing photographic series Flare (2023-ongoing), documenting the private, intimate moments of flare-up. Intermittently bed and housebound since 2019, Jamila originally developed an artistic practice as a response to a worsening in her lifelong disability that meant she could no longer work in arts organisations. Adapting her practice to exist from bed, she has since had further health deteriorations that have made making largely inaccessible to her. Flare is a series taken in stolen moments directly from her sick bed. The title references both the focus of disability flare-ups and the moment that occurs when an analogue photo gets overexposed, leaving a light flare across the image. Taken in and around sickness, in darkened rooms, the images regularly take on a distorted and blurred quality, correlating with the unpredictability of both film and health. It reveals the oft-unseen, hidden moments of flare-up, which exist outside of societal norms of respectability; going weeks without washing, unable to leave bed, cook, socialise or work. 

Here, Jamila uses a selection of images from the series as prompts for a diaristic stream of consciousness, reflecting on this period of her life, and the experience of being cut off from the outside social world and debilitated by ever-changing physical symptoms. The words form a confessional of all the long-held emotions that have been too difficult or painful to articulate. This is combined with poetic audio descriptions of the images: expanding the experience of the artwork through a different sensory register, regrounding in the materiality, and providing an access adjustment for anyone Blind, Partially Sighted or those with barriers around processing visual information. Creative closed captioning adds a further dimension to the work. Jamila shares these moments in an attempt to release some of the shame surrounding the experience. The film was developed through a writing commission through Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary Deaf and Disabled Writer Commission.