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Emily Silverman

this is The Nocturnists Uncertainty in Medicine. I'm Emily Silverman, and today we're stepping inside the studio of Leila. Simon Hayes, Leila is a visual artist and award winning designer in Boston. Her work explores color, shape and movement and takes the form of rich, bold patterns printed on textiles, wallpapers, homewares, book covers and other household objects. Central to Leila's process is that she starts all her work without a plan.

Leila Simon Hayes  

I mean, most of what I'm making comes from a practice of worshiping imperfectionism and really letting things unfold as they unfold, starting with shapes, usually from black ink. I use a lot of Sumi ink. I fell in love. It's just the most opaque, smooth, delicious substance to paint with.

Emily Silverman  

Today we jump into Leila's world to learn more about what her artistic process dedicated to, the inevitability of spontaneous beauty can teach us about navigating Uncertainty in Medicine, because for Leila, when she's in the studio, it's about making work, but it's also about cultivating the skills of sitting with uncertainty and trusting her gut, both skills that she's relied on to navigate her own journey of diagnostic uncertainty and physical pain since she was a teen, Leila's been dealing with food sensitivities that severely impact her health, most notably an extreme reaction to sugar, which when she was 19, doctors told Her wasn't real. By the time she was in her 20s, chronic pain was constant, along with inexplicable injuries. Still, she encountered resistance in the healthcare system, false certainty or even outright disbelief when she tried to seek help.

Leila Simon Hayes  

I got the sense that I was annoying to doctors and that they very easily put me in a diagnosis that feels like this is not very nice, but kind of like a dumpster where people who have challenging diagnoses get dumped when doctors don't know.

Emily Silverman  

Leila's pain felt mysterious, ever changing and impossible to describe in the short bursts of time allotted in medical appointments.

Leila Simon Hayes  

It never was a diagnosis that resonated with me. It was basically just acknowledging that I have chronic pain and that it has mysterious elements and onsets and responses, but I felt kind of dismissed, and so I kind of backed away from doctors for many, many years, and decided that talking about my health was not great for my health, so I just really paused. 

Emily Silverman  

Leila found ways to prevent and manage her own pain best she could. As her career as a designer took off. The Work drew on her love of drawing, painting and collage, all things that she'd done and loved since she was a kid. But as her life filled up with work and with raising young kids, she started to feel like something was missing. 

Leila Simon Hayes  

You know, I've always been an artist, but when I was 41 I had just left a job that was really unsatisfying, and leaving that job made me feel the absence of my own art, making more intensely than I really ever had.

Emily Silverman  

Leila said the pull back to a personal creative practice, one that came from her own impulses and not from her job, felt impossible to ignore. 

Leila Simon Hayes  

It's as if it was asking something of me and asking me to get out of the way.

Emily Silverman  

So she went back to working freelance, and shortly thereafter, came across an idea. Idea on Instagram called the 100 days project, basically come up with a prompt to make something every day for 100 days. The prompt should be so simple that you can't not do it every day.

Leila Simon Hayes  

I wrote this whole long list great ideas. There must have been like 75 different ideas, but they were all a little complicated, and I wasn't sure that I could show up for them for 100 days. And at the very bottom, I don't know when I added it, but it's in a different pen. It's in horrible handwriting. It was just like 10 shapes, 10 colors remixed every day. And it was so simple, and it was so back to what I really loved as a kid, collaging tissue paper, gluing it onto construction paper, you know, like, really the basics of shapes relating.

Emily Silverman  

Leila set the list aside, but she couldn't get the idea out of her head. A few days later, she got started.

Leila Simon Hayes  

Time was of the essence. It was just like, if I don't start it now, I'm not going to do it. I created 10 shapes and I chose 10 colors, and I set up a file that I could just go to every single day and just remix the shapes and colors. Some of them would take five minutes. Some of them would take two hours. Some of them would take something in between. I tried to go really light and really quick, back to that feeling of getting out of the way of the art that wanted to come forward, and I would notice myself kind of judging the process. This is too simple. I no longer like these colors or these shapes are, you know, no longer interesting to me, but I just kept the colors, kept the shapes, and kept going. On the 100th day, I unintentionally made a pattern.

Emily Silverman  

Leila put all the shapes together, playing with layering and repetition in a way she hadn't for any of the 99 days that had come before. All of a sudden, these shapes, each one of them related to the essence of some memory or emotion or sensation became something else entirely.

Leila Simon Hayes  

Something felt like it really clicked. I was like, Well, I'm done with this project. But then I was like, I am not done with this project. This project just began. So I committed to another 100 days, but this time with the sense of exploring pattern and playing with repetition. 

Emily Silverman  

She said the return to art making was indescribably healing, the way it put her more back in touch with her body and her intuition, and allowed her to just be more fully herself. Part of this is just how iterative her process is. 

Leila Simon Hayes  

I never have an idea of how something is going to be in the end, which is good because there is no end, because I'm constantly reusing pieces or elements in different ways. I'm always like cutting things up that I think I'm done with. I have this basket that's called the Four later basket. So I throw out a lot of stuff because I make a large quantity of elements to work with, and I need to be kind of ruthless, or else this place would be full of paper.

Emily Silverman  

Leila's studio is like a shrine to uncertainty. White sheets of paper Hang on one wall with simple shapes drying in black ink on the opposite wall colorful quilts adorned with intricately interlocking patterns morph and remake themselves the longer you look. Simplicity becomes complexity through listening. Leila says listening to what wants to come out as she works, she leads us to a collection of shapes cut out like puzzle pieces lying on the counter, all of them formed the basis of a series of textiles she displayed at a recent gallery show called Spirit studies.

Leila Simon Hayes  

I created this collection just based on different dance memories that I had had dance has been an incredibly important part of my life, forever, and maybe they were gestures of literal feelings of dancing, like moving from one area to the next, or this was actually I was drawing the experience of sliding on the floor in my socks at age 10 at my friend Andrea's house, listening to. Michael Jackson, and that's just like, you know, just that kind of feeling that then hold on became this whole pattern that told an even deeper story of, right? Yeah, it's got this whole thing. But then there's also some sadness, there's some exuberance, there's everything mixed in.

Emily Silverman  

Leila says that more and more she's finding freedom in resisting the need for clean symbolism in her work.

Leila Simon Hayes  

There's no right or wrong, and there's no one imposing what should happen or what someone else is seeing. In fact, I have this, like, really strong filter for when people tell me what they see in my artwork, like, Oh, that looks like a, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know. And I'm just, I don't have any problem with hearing that. I actually really enjoy hearing that people connect with it in their own ways. But really, I thrive on how abstract the process is and how abstract the outcome is for me.

Emily Silverman  

The parallels between Leila's resistance to premature categorizing in her artwork and her medical journey are striking. She says that after stepping away from doctors in her early 20s, she was really on her own for many years in terms of managing her pain and an increasing list of other symptoms. But that wilderness, although lonely at times, just felt so obviously preferable to what she saw as Western medicine's agenda to fit her into whatever box it could stuff her in. 

Leila Simon Hayes  

Not becoming that diagnosis and not becoming the story of a person with that diagnosis was really helpful to live in the uncertainty of what was going on inside of my body and really finding some comfort and not needing To know but I still really struggled with chronic pain, and it was like, you know, decades into it.

Emily Silverman  

Then a couple years ago, out of the blue, a mutual friend connected Leila with Rachael Lussos Tin, a researcher studying people's experiences of misdiagnosis and chronic pain and how they communicated about that pain with their doctors, Leila says she still doesn't know why she agreed to go meet with the researcher. By that point, she was so burnt out on trying to pin down the un-pinned downable, but she went, and it turns out that that interview would be a total game changer.

Leila Simon Hayes  

We talked for probably an hour or two, and her questions were open ended, questions that were very specific, like she really had a lot of patience for trying to get to the word combinations that describe accurately, pain, trying out words, going back, being like, Well, okay, that one was right, but that one wasn't right. And then talking about how much space specific pain takes up in my body, and what the edges of it feel like, and what the sensation of it feels like, offering a real opening for it to sound weird and for it to not sound medically correct and like One of the most important words that came from that interview was gluey. I was talking about a specific type of pain that I get every once in a while that is like a gluey sensation inside my joints. And I kept being like, I know that's a weird word. And she was like, that's such a great word. And you know that with a combination of some other words, led her to be like, only people that I have interviewed with this particular diagnosis use those combination of words.

Emily Silverman  

This interview ended up unlocking what would become a really important diagnosis for Leila, one that she still holds lightly and chose not to share with us, but that gave her new tools to navigate her pain, listen to her body and prevent further injury.

Leila Simon Hayes  

Her listening to me so deeply and so openly without an agenda, without trying to fit me. Into a box. It helped me really listen to myself. I felt safer to go inside of the pain. 

Emily Silverman  

The practice of going inside the pain, becoming more acquainted with its exact dimensions and textures and qualities and sensations has been critical in what Leila says has been a sea change in her experience of the pain itself. Still, Leila says uncertainty is ongoing in her life and in her creative practice. And rather than fight it, she's learned to sit with it, to listen and to trust that something meaningful will eventually emerge.

Leila Simon Hayes  

[ In Studio] I can't find the original pieces. But did you just gasp? I love that. Yeah, I think that's that's the whole point. I recently was working on a piece that started with a big gesture with a gigantic marker, like really playing with pressure and movement, and I thought it was very ugly, like the shape that was happening, just like was not speaking to me, but I know from My process that it's just about continuing. So I took a different marker and created a different line that broke into the first line, and it was like, Okay, well, that's something else. Like they're that's completely different than the first one. And then, as I like to do, I got my scissors and cut it up. Probably when you leave, I'll find the thing that I wanted to show you, which is the original pieces I love. What happens in my brain when I cut things up that piece too. I'm not going to shred that one. It's a reminder that everything's constantly evolving, and nothing needs to be as precious as we think it needs to be, and that precious gems come from deconstruction and sheet like, if you see this like, you can imagine a whole sheet of wonky cut out circles I was playing with the different strips, you know, flipping them and Turning them and seeing the different relationships between the way that the lines were now interrupted. I mostly just my best stuff comes when I just don't know what to do with myself. And so I just took a nice sharp exacto knife and I just just sliced them all into these strips, and then I just took out all the middle ones and put the end two together, and it was like, Ah, that was the point of the whole piece. But I didn't know that going into it, and I'm not supposed to know that going into it. And, you know, you could just, like, see all these different like, Oh, wow. That actually is how it was originally. It's, it's just like a following instructions type of process of, now we're doing this and oh wow, there's my ego, judging it, thinking it's ugly, and then responding with something else, seeing if that does something different. Okay, that does something different, and then cutting it up, being like, oh, freedom. This thing is having its own life, and then putting the last two together and just having this feeling of like it's that click, you know, where Something is, something emerges, something emerges that feels right.

Emily Silverman  

Thanks for listening to the Nocturnists Uncertainty in Medicine. Our core uncertainty team includes me, Emily Silverman, The Nocturnists, head of story development, Molly Rose Williams, producer and editor, Sam Osborn and our uncertainty correspondent, Alexa Miller of arts practica, our student producers are Clare Nimura and Selin Everett. Special thanks to Maggie Jackson and Paul Han. Our executive producer is Ali Block. Our program director is Ashley Pettit. Our original theme music was composed by Asche & Spencer, and additional music came from Blue Dot sessions. Artwork for Uncertainty in Medicine was created. Created by Eleni Debo, who is represented by folio illustration and animation agency. The nocturnist Uncertainty in Medicine was made possible by generous support from the ABIM Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation. The Nocturnists title sponsor is the California Medical Association, a physician led organization that works to keep the doctor patient relationship at the heart of medicine. To learn more, visit cmadocs.org. The Nocturnists is also made possible by support from listeners like you. In fact, we recently moved over to substack, which makes it easier than ever to support our work directly by joining us for a monthly or annual membership, you'll become an essential part of our creative community. If you enjoy the show, consider signing up today at the nocturnists.substack.com. If you enjoy this episode, please share with a friend or colleague. Post on social media and help others find us by giving us a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. I'm your host. Emily Silverman, see you next week you.