The Healthy Heart Trust

The Art of the Heart Awards launched in 2022 as an international competition for visually artistic works which illustrate matters of health and illness related to the heart or circulation.

The Winner of the Art of The Heart awards 2023 is Erin Fitzsimons-West. This art work has been honoured with both the ‘most original, creative, and emotive’ and the ‘most visually engaging’ awards.

“My art piece is created using the medium of handicraft (knitting). I believe the heart is unique in its connectivity, but this also results in a fragility, with a subset of conditions relating to the heart focusing on problems with connectivity (arrhythmia). I used knitting as my medium to highlight the inter-connectivity within the heart, and to address how a small change, such as structural changes over time, such as atherosclerosis, or genetic change which we may see in connectivity conditions such as Brugada syndrome, can result in a symptomatic change.

This is highlighted in the artwork through missing of a stitch resulting in an unraveling of part of the heart, and creating a visible and prominent difference. It was a pleasure to combine my interests in medicine with my enthusiasm for handicrafts; within cardiology often there is the necessity to be creative, whether that be in surgery through innovative techniques, or within the wards navigating situations of comorbidities.”