The
Waiting Room
Book Launch // 6 – 7pm 26th May 2026 book a ticket
Press release
“In the moment of crisis, the urgency of beauty becomes even more apparent.” — Anne Boyer
The Waiting Room is a new publication by artist Katrin Lock of photographic work and writing that emerged from her experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2022. The project will be launched as a book accompanied by an artist talk at Barts Hospital, returning the work to the site in which it was conceived.
Developed during a period marked by uncertainty, repetition and prolonged waiting, The Waiting Room begins as a personal response to illness, while unfolding into a wider inquiry into time, materiality, and perception. Faced with the disorientation of diagnosis and treatment, Lock turns to photography as both a structuring device and a form of retreat: a way of isolating moments, narrowing attention, and working through the altered temporalities of illness.
The photographs focus on details within Barts Hospital – marks, scratches, worn surfaces, and architectural traces accumulated over centuries. Founded in 1123, Barts is one of London’s oldest hospitals, its buildings bearing the material evidence of long histories of care, damage, and repair. Lock’s images move between abstraction and documentation, drawing awareness to the textures of stone, the residue of use, and the subtle inscriptions of time. In parallel with the anticipated transformations of her own body due to treatment, these surfaces become sites through which histories of vulnerability and endurance are registered – connecting her body with the collective body of the many patients that have passed through these same diagnoses and waiting rooms.
The book is similarly layered – made in collaboration with book designer Rosa Nussbaum – with no front or back cover, comprises varying textures of paper and print finishes, assembled from large pages that are folded and sewn together, intercut with semi-transparent sleeves housing eleven individual photographs, which can be taken out of the book to form their own photo series.
The project takes inspiration from works like Man Ray’s Breeding Dust (1920) and Helen Binet’s The Gardens of Suzhou (2021), where abstraction operates as a form of visual meditation. In Lock’s work, close looking becomes a method for navigating uncertainty, even as it acknowledges its own limits. As Susan Sontag writes, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”
Book Launch // 6 – 7pm 26th May 2026 book a ticket
Press release
“In the moment of crisis, the urgency of beauty becomes even more apparent.” — Anne Boyer
The Waiting Room is a new publication by artist Katrin Lock of photographic work and writing that emerged from her experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2022. The project will be launched as a book accompanied by an artist talk at Barts Hospital, returning the work to the site in which it was conceived.
Developed during a period marked by uncertainty, repetition and prolonged waiting, The Waiting Room begins as a personal response to illness, while unfolding into a wider inquiry into time, materiality, and perception. Faced with the disorientation of diagnosis and treatment, Lock turns to photography as both a structuring device and a form of retreat: a way of isolating moments, narrowing attention, and working through the altered temporalities of illness.
The photographs focus on details within Barts Hospital – marks, scratches, worn surfaces, and architectural traces accumulated over centuries. Founded in 1123, Barts is one of London’s oldest hospitals, its buildings bearing the material evidence of long histories of care, damage, and repair. Lock’s images move between abstraction and documentation, drawing awareness to the textures of stone, the residue of use, and the subtle inscriptions of time. In parallel with the anticipated transformations of her own body due to treatment, these surfaces become sites through which histories of vulnerability and endurance are registered – connecting her body with the collective body of the many patients that have passed through these same diagnoses and waiting rooms.
The book is similarly layered – made in collaboration with book designer Rosa Nussbaum – with no front or back cover, comprises varying textures of paper and print finishes, assembled from large pages that are folded and sewn together, intercut with semi-transparent sleeves housing eleven individual photographs, which can be taken out of the book to form their own photo series.
The project takes inspiration from works like Man Ray’s Breeding Dust (1920) and Helen Binet’s The Gardens of Suzhou (2021), where abstraction operates as a form of visual meditation. In Lock’s work, close looking becomes a method for navigating uncertainty, even as it acknowledges its own limits. As Susan Sontag writes, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”
While photography is often understood as a means of fixing time, The Waiting Room attends instead to its expansion and distortion – how, in states of illness, time can become slow, dense, and difficult to inhabit.
Alongside her photographs, Lock gathers text cards of her own writing together with a constellation of references spanning art, literature, and feminist thought. Figures such as Johanna Hedva, Anne Boyer, Virginia Woolf, and Jo Spence form part of an ongoing dialogue within the work – all in the same font and size – offering ways to articulate the embodied, affective, and social dimensions of illness.
The hospital environment itself becomes a complex field of observation: waiting rooms, treatment areas, flowers brought by visitors, and the artist’s own therapeutic gardening all enter the frame. Beneath the photographs and text, Lock collages images of medication leaflets, medical illustrations, a plaster bust of Rahere by Giuseppe Baldacci, digital renditions of cancer cells growing, doodles, and historical materials, including photographs of a patient’s evacuation during a war outbreak in 1939. These elements form provisional still lifes and assemblages, where meaning emerges through attention, or rather distraction, through small acts of looking that interrupt the weight of waiting.
While rooted in a specific personal experience, The Waiting Room extends beyond autobiography. It considers how illness reorganises perception and relation – how it reshapes one’s sense of time, body, and environment, while also radiating outward into social and architectural space. The work observes what exceeds representation: time, silences, not knowing. The acceptance of change and the impermanence of body and space.
80 pages
23.5 x 30.5 cm
Please contact us for more information or if you would like to buy a copy.