Declining nudes and the fragmentation of the sick body.
June 22, 2026
To be a medical patient in the Western world is to move between the extremes of the body merging and fragmenting with and via machines. The body is connected to monitors, which measure one’s heart rate, and tubes channel medication under the skin. Yet, diagnostic machinery segments limbs and body parts to image and treat patients. At her current solo exhibition, Comfort Corners at Foyer-LA, Ellie Krakow attends to the way chronic illness evokes this paradigm. Krakow takes familiar forms of the body—a stomach, a belly button, an arm—and melds them with the architecture and furniture of the hospital, such as a bed, a screen, and a grab bar. Her resin sculptures harness her prowess in other forms like painting and photography by layering powdery pinks and Band-Aid tones to create uncanny fleshiness, and she embeds photographic details within the sculptures to evoke vinyl seating or the drop ceilings of a waiting room. By merging the softness and vulnerability of the body with the mechanical devices used to keep her alive, we see, and more importantly feel, how our bodies and selves are splintered within medical institutions.
Ayden LeRoux Since we started doing studio visits several years ago, one of the core threads of our dialogue has been about how the history of art includes so many naked women in repose. You’ve often joked that your work, which is about chronic illness, shows “declining” rather than “reclining” nudes.
Ellie Krakow After years of looking at one naked woman reclining on a daybed after another, I wanted to upend that trope. I think about all the ways we lie down in medical spaces, positions that are almost entirely absent from the history of art, like the clinical posture required for a colonoscopy, the prone position needed for a breast MRI, and the tilted chairs we rest in during infusions. “Declining” is a perfect corresponding piece of language. Its rhyming echo summons that entire art-historical lineage through playful sonic similarity.
AL I love the way you engage with art history; it feels very unpretentious in how it invites viewers into the lineage you place yourself in. You also are so erudite in thinking about pedestals; supports that are often supposed to disappear are deeply considered for each sculpture. You have a previous series all about armatures that support three-dimensional pieces. How do you think about the connection between physical materials that hold up your artwork and participate in its display? Are they extensions of each other?
EK I’m a bit nerdy about pedestals and mounts. One of the central issues I’m grappling with in my work is support. As someone living with illness that isn’t outwardly visible and is managed through ongoing medical treatment and surveillance, my life depends on systems of support. But much of that support remains unseen or is only visible within the private realm of medical care. I’m a social person and fairly open about my illness, but even so, the circle of people who see me in hospital settings is relatively small. The infrastructure that sustains me—the rolling carts, IV stands, screens, pumps, tubes—has a visually specific design language, which is fascinating to me artistically but, like my illness, isn’t really seen in everyday life. I’m working to find ways to represent the experience of living within that network of medical support by asserting its presence and pulling it out of the margins.
I am asking and answering the questions: What does it look like to rely on support? What does it mean for support to become part of us?Those questions emerge within the sculptures themselves and how I think about what they sit on and attach to. In Embedded (2026), a body merges with the rails of a hospital bed. In place of the arm, the bedrail emerges from the shoulder. The architectural support—that we rely on to pull ourselves upright or that protects and holds us when we need to remain in bed—becomes integrated into the body itself.
In terms of pedestals, even though I think of my works as autonomous sculptures rather than installations, the pedestals evoke a lot of my conceptual concerns. In my current show at Foyer-LA, I surprised myself with the direction the pedestals took. I was trying to solve a logistical problem—the exhibition is far from where I live—so I decided to design pedestals with removable legs so they could collapse for transport. While working on them, I realized I was unconsciously borrowing the logic of hospital design. Medical equipment is often stackable, collapsible, and modular, so spaces and tools can adapt to different procedures and patient flow. What began as a practical solution in the context of the exhibition became, in the context of the work, a nod toward meaning-making.
AL That makes so much sense because you call attention to how furniture sculpts our forms every day as it holds our bodies and orients them with chairs, couches, tables, and beds. This merging of furniture and body illuminates so much about how hospital devices are designed. I’m struck by how your work ontologically mimics the way we are split into pieces by both medical charts and images.
EK Being seen in parts was one of the first ideas I reckoned with when I decided to represent living with illness. Western medicine focuses on specific ailments. Doctors and treatments tend to be very specified and localized. My gastroenterologist knows so much about my gut just by touching my abdomen, and yet I have no idea if she knows anything about other parts of my body. This is not a criticism; it’s simply not part of our dialogue. I section the body based on physical aspects I have had to pay specific attention to: a butt with a cylindrical anus or an abdomen with a rectangular cavity. The belly button is also an important image and symbol for me as a corporeal tether to the physical support of our mothers. I’ve made a number of small sculptures—Ports (2023–24)—where the belly button is merged with some type of plug-in device inspired by an ultrasound wand, IV tube, or power cord. There is something tender and alienating about reliance that I am reflecting on in these pieces.
“Being seen in parts was one of the first ideas I reckoned with when I decided to represent living with illness.”
— Ellie Krakow
AL One of the things that feels so singular about your work formally is the way you incorporate photography into your sculptures. A close-up of a pattern from a hospital waiting-room chair or from the drop-ceiling tile. How did you come to integrate photographs into three-dimensional forms?
EK You know how when you’re sitting in a waiting room, your focus might be hyper-attuned to one detail but blurry around the edges? I wanted to mimic that embodied experience. I had a show at Marinaro a few years ago where I showed three bodies of work: a group of abstract ceramic sculptures, a group of drawings that imagined my sculptures in medical environments, and a group of photographs of textures in medical spaces. When I finished that exhibition, I realized that the drawings were creating a narrative space, the sculptures were implying bodily presence, and the photos were reflecting on the optical experience of being a patient. After that show, I wanted to cinch those three elements together and have the bodily, narrative, and optical function in unison. That’s when I decided that the photos needed to be embedded into the sculptures.
AL The way these photographs of space and architecture get folded into corporeal forms is so intriguing; it feels reminiscent of how X-rays and other medical-imaging devices see inside the body. You are playing with how the images of our insides determine so much of how we narrativize our bodies externally.
EK I’m not just interested in how these images create narratives; I’m also interested in how they relate to access and power. We receive information about ourselves through advanced photographic imaging, but many of these images are illegible to the untrained eye; they require a technician to interpret them. There is a kind of mediation and authority to the images. Declining Nude (with Basin, Prop, and Handle) (2025) probes this issue quite directly. There is a handle on the back of the sculpture that opens the area that holds the photographic element. But it also visually implies that one can open the body. I am interested in how this evokes ideas about consent and access to the body’s interior, whether through medical procedures or sexual encounters.
AL You’ve also been working on a series of fountains. I saw one called Gas (2024) gurgling and bubbling on the floor at your studio last year. The pink tiles connect to make intestinal curves. How do fountains fit into where you’re headed next in thinking about chronic illness?
EK Fountains are probably the most celebratory sculptural form, with their water spurting out in ecstatic displays of fertility and sexual prowess. My fountains celebrate living with illness instead. I think of the fountain as a body, with the tiles as its guts. This work keeps expanding, and it opens up questions about bodily systems and circulation, and how they connect to the systems that sustain us, from aqueducts to toilets to medical infusions and ECMO machines. The more I work with the content of illness, the more I feel humor and celebration belong at the center with us sick people.
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2026/06/22/ellie-krakow-by-ayden-leroux/