Liverwurst : Work Made at the Onset of End-stage Liver Failure Until Live-donor Organ Transplantation (December 2007-June 2009)

The process of transplantation is a grueling one- demanding physical participation in a batteryof tests and procedures as well as an emotional commitment to oneself and acceptance of the unknown. This is a beautiful catalogue of stories, photographs and drawings that tell Ella's story of chronic illness and her journey towards transplant. Throughout this process she demonstrates a remarkable spirit and strength despite loss, illness and ever present chance of dying. Through her art and words she provides a window into her soul as she faces her own mortality with grace, maturity and humor. ---Ariana Rose, Nurse PractitionerThe remarkable hospital sketchbook of artist Ella Watson chronicles her two year crisis battlingend-stage liver failure.

A young woman in need of an organ transplant, with no insurance, nomoney, no parents, no safety net: in drawing after luminous drawing she tells the story.

It is agraphic tour de force. Her body inside and out, breached and cut open, perforated with tubes andpumps, fever dreams in emergency rooms, portraits of fellow patients, life-giving nurses, latex-gloved hands, monitors, pills, syringes, clocks (above all clocks): a gurney-eye tour of intensivecare.

She wins passage through the disintegrating U.S. social welfare system, through the veilof pain and time, doing the thing she knows best: drawing and writing for her life.

Her eye andsteady hand miss nothing. Ella captures -- for her doctors, for her brother and sisters, for us, andfor art -- the misery and triumph of the life urge. ---Elizabeth King, Sculpture Department, Virginia Commonwealth University