Jill Aalhus | Aura
Jill Aalhus
Aura
EDGE GALLERY
September 4 - 26, 2026
Opening Reception: September 4, 5-7pm
Aura examines how chronic illness shapes perception. Chronic migraines, something I experience more days than not, are the most immediate entry point into the collection. The title refers to migraine aura, visual disruptions that often occur before migraine pain sets in. They can look like seeing stars, blurred vision, prisms, flashes, blind spots, or lights bleeding into each other. They are startling, disorienting, and unnervingly beautiful.
I see the world in double vision due to an alignment issue with my eyes, which migraine intensifies. My migraines are often accompanied by extreme sensitivity to sound, light, and smell, as if all of my senses have been turned up too high.
This collection renders these experiences through expressive brushstrokes, textured surfaces, mirrored images, and unresolved edges. It features my own X-rays, MRI scans, ultrasounds, photographs, self-portraits, and everyday medical objects as raw material for digital paintings, photographic collages, acrylic paintings, and installations.
Migraine experiences form much of the collection’s visual language, but they are only one part of it. The work also draws from my experience living with multiple chronic illnesses and the accumulation of diagnoses, tests, surgeries, medications, and waitlists.
While much of my previous work has focused on light and landscape, with Aura, I turned this focus inward where perception itself becomes unstable. This collection is the result of my attempt to capture the landscape of a chronically and mentally ill body, which is, at times, surreal, and how illness can shift one’s sense of self.
Chronic illness is often depicted only through suffering. In Aura, the artwork brings viewers into the experience and explores its unexpected visual language: auras, the glow of relief, mirrored forms, blurred edges, and the ways it reshapes the body and self.
JILL AALHUS
Jill Aalhus is a queer white settler writer and visual artist living on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta'an Kwäch'än Council. Originally from Northern British Columbia, her work is influenced by her connection to the North. Jill’s creative practice blends digital and traditional painting, photography, poetry, and creative non-fiction to explore embodiment, illness, queer experiences, and memory, alongside an ongoing fascination with northern light and landscape. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, SubTerrain, Grain, and emerge. Her photo collage/poetry piece won the 2024 Grain Hybrid Contest, and five of her poems won the 2025 Lush Triumphant Literary Award for Poetry. Her work has also been longlisted for the 2025 Palette Queer Poetry Prize and the 2025 Lush Triumphant Literary Award for Creative Non-fiction. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and attended the 2025 Sage Hill Emerging Writers Prose Retreat. She is currently completing her first poetry collection, Liquid. Aura is her first solo art show.
Past Exhibitions
