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About the Migraine Art website project

The aim of this project is to catalogue, digitally scan, and make publicly available online for the first time the entire Migraine Art Collection of over 550 original pieces of artwork held by Migraine Action.

Since 2011, medical historian Katherine Foxhall (School of History, University of Leicester) has been working on a book project which examines how people have understood, talked about and treated migraine since the medieval period. As part of the project, Katherine researched Migraine Action’s art collection, and we often wondered how we could make this important archive of migraine experience more accessible. You can read more about Katherine’s research on the history of migraine here.

In early 2016 Katherine and Migraine Action successfully bid for funding from the University of Leicester Impact Development Fund, which aims to help researchers develop the public impact of their work. This enabled us to employ a researcher to catalogue and scan the collection, and to commission the Leicester-based social-enterprise design and communications agency We Are Epic to create this website.

Our hope is that this website will be a valuable resource for people living with, or supporting a person living with migraine, as well as neurologists, health and education workers, scholars and artists. We hope in particular that this website will be of use to children with migraine, and those who are supporting them to learn more about this very common, but often misunderstood, illness. Every image can be downloaded for free in low resolution for personal or educational use. High-resolution (600 dpi) images for publications or commercial use can also be ordered through the website. Full details about how to use the images are here

We would like to thank the University of Leicester for funding this project, Simon Dixon and his team in the University of Library Special Collections for their assistance with scanning, and the Wellcome Trust for their funding of Dr Katherine Foxhall’s original research project. We are also grateful to our web developers, We Are Epic, and Dr Steve Ling, the project associate for their enthusiasm and hard work in seeing this project come to light.

We hope that you enjoy using this website and the images within it, and would love to hear from you with comments or suggestions.
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Welcome to the

Migraine Action Art Collection

National charity, Migraine Action, holds one of the few migraine art collections in the world. Including over 500 pieces, the Art Collection was created by members of the public, largely in response to four competitions, held between 1980 and 1987.

The collection contains a huge variety of expressions of what it means to experience life with migraine, from visual patterns experienced by those with visual aura, to the pain aspects of what a migraine really feels like.

The artists come from every walk of life, and include works by both adults and children. Now for the first time, Migraine Action’s Art Collection is freely available to all online.