Art from pain

By Melissa Meehan
PAIN inspires.
It’s a motto 16-year-old Sarah Vafidis lives by.
As I arrive she takes me into her room of inspiration, a study turned into her own artistic paradise.
Her bubbly personality is an absolute contradiction to the room we stand in.
The walls are covered in Tim Burton’s dark movie characters. Sarah’s hand-made dolls and the words S.T.A.B. M.E hover over the door.
As the Gazette photographer snaps away, Sarah can’t keep a straight face and her laugh is infectious.
Her proud mum Heather tells her story.
“She’s been sick for three years with Neurally Mediated Hypotension and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis – that’s where the M.E. comes from,” she said.
“And after being so sick for so long – and the doctors not taking her pain seriously – Sarah started art therapy and it’s taken off from there.”
Her illness means that Sarah’s body reacts more slowly to adrenaline than other people and in turn causes her heart rate to slow down, making her faint. She recently had a pacemaker put in to help her blood pressure and regulate her heart rate.
Sarah shows me her dolls, and explains their characters and names.
“There are Scarlett, Tiff, Abbey and Beccy (S.T.A.B) – I name the characters after the medication I’m on and depending on whether the medication works drives whether the character is good or evil,” Sarah said.
The budding playwright and director used these characters to enter a competition to meet her idol, international director Tim Burton at ACMI later this month.
“A friend told me about it and I knew I had to enter, I was going to do something like this anyway so it worked out perfectly,” she said.
“I really find that I can identify with him and his movies.”
Sarah, who can’t attend school because of her illness, said she spent a lot of time at home watching Tim Burton movies like Edward Scissorhands and Corpse Bride when she first became unwell.
“I felt like I could identify with the movies, in the movies there is the feeling of being an outsider, that they are in a different world,” she said.
“I feel the same, not being able to go out with my friends, or go to school I feel like I have a world in here and a different world out there.”
Sarah is one of eight young Australians who have been chosen to meet their idol when artist and film maker Tim Burton visits the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on Thursday 24 June.
Her film entry, a stop motion feature including the dolls she hand makes was the reason she was chosen.
“I can’t wait,” she said.