A new visual art exhibition at University Galleries highlights the vulnerability and mundanity of recovery from repetitive use injuries, with artist Margaret Crowley's mother, a hairstylist for 40 years, as a case study.
Crowley helped her mom recover from rotator cuff surgery, attending her physical therapy sessions.
“The surgery actually heals pretty quickly,” Crowley said. “Then it’s about just getting the rotation in that joint, making sure it doesn’t freeze in one position."
It’s a painful, vulnerable process, Crowley learned, requiring someone to re-learn how to perform basic daily tasks.
“Pain is a part of the recovery and healing,” she said. “I also was surprised that physical therapy is super boring.”
Crowley spent several days a week with her mom in a clinic in her hometown, Ottawa, while on maternity leave. She picked up on little details to stave off that boredom: the pattern of a fatigue-resistant, cushy floor mat splattered with white dots, pictures of puppies hanging in the staff's bullpen and the incessant beep of a timer signaling the end of an exercise, for example. All of it is highlighted in a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures Crowley collectively calls Hazard, on view through Feb. 26 at University Galleries.
“It was really nice to spend that time together,” Crowley said. “It was also the first chunk of time she ever took off from work. That was a new thing to be together in that way.”
Crowley attended Illinois State University as an undergrad. She has dual master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and Eastern Illinois University and helps run the contemporary art gallery Produce Model in Chicago. She trained in portraiture and representational drawing and painting but has lately been blurring the lines between the literal and the abstract.
“I’m much more interested in pushing that spectrum between representation and abstraction,” said Crowley. “I like to think that people can come to these at their own pace. Abstraction can be through the crop; it can be through scale. Some of it can be through the material.”

The first wall of the gallery is meant to imply the view of a therapy patient.
“The first painting is a really close-up view of a tennis shoe and the one right next to it is a somewhat abstracted painting of an ID badge. Both of these viewpoints depicted the intimacy of this kind of treatment,” Crowley said. “For the rotator cuff, especially right after the surgery, the therapist is basically embracing the patient. So, the gaze is at your feet or at the person that’s pressed up against you.”
Crowley paints on silk, another nod to the paradox of a physical therapy clinic: the precarity and deep vulnerability of healing your body in an inherently sterile, public environment.
“I love that dichotomy,” she said. “I started painting on silk about five or six years ago. I was basically looking for a material that behaved like the cape at the hair salon — something that had an architecture or a body of its own. I cut it, I die it, I shampoo it and wash it a lot; I add all these elements that are hair salon processes. So, the silk becomes almost like a biological material — it’s kind of like hair.”
Thus, Crowley, too, performs repetitive motions for her job, as do most artists. She said she hopes one takeaway of Hazard is to rethink the “all go, no quit,” culture of physical occupations.
“What’s interesting about physical therapy for an occupational injury is that [culture] was motivation for my mom to do the exercises and recover,” she said. “You’re going through this six to nine-month recovery period to get back to the thing that injured you. There’s almost some humor there. There’s a lot of humanity there.”
Hazard runs through Feb. 26 at University Galleries, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal. Artist Margaret Crowley will be in conversation at 4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30 in the gallery. Art and poetry-making sessions responding to the work are listed at galleries.illinoistate.edu. Free admission.