Florence Nightingale (1820 - 1910) was the founder of modern nursing, a social reformer and statistician.

The popularised image of Nightingale in her bonnet with her famous lamp, attending to wounded and sick soldiers in field hospitals often loses the wider story of her as an early statistician, collecting and visualising data on causes of mortality in the British army to inform her pioneering nursing approach. Different parts of Nightingale’s ‘rose diagram’ surround her in this image, and I wanted to use the central design of the chart as a replacement icon over her head where we would normally see her bonnet - I like the way the shape is reminiscent of female headwear at this time, and here it represents her innovative thinking. I also wanted to go back to this drawing of young Florence made by her sister - to make the most of the textures and to re-imagine her image as a data pioneer before the male gaze shaped photographic images of her. Checking the public domain status of this image took me online to the US where it’s held in the UCLA libraries special collection.

Next to her, I have reunited her with her pet owl Athena, perched on top one of her belongings - presented here in playful relative sizing - her moonstone seal held in the Science Museum Collection. The seal features the motif ‘Brighter Hours Will Come’ and her lamp in the centre of it. It feels good to reference her famous lamp in this object but position it amongst her charts and data. The seal also nods to her prolific campaigning and letter writing - her signature is taken from the Wellcome collection archive of her many letters, which are also represented in her handwriting in the background of this portrait. I discovered through my research for this project that Florence is likely to have lived with the disease Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME, and did a lot of her campaigning from bed. I began this project as something I could do from bed or sofa with ME, so I feel a kinship with Florence that I wasn’t expecting - this one is dedicated to all the horizontal, chronically ill creators and thinkers.

Moonstone seal photo © Science Museum Group.