One of medicine's greatest problems has been partially unlocked by a victim of chronic pain armed with a camera and an easy manner with fellow-sufferers.

Images of a jacket made from shattered glass, claws scratching across concrete and a howling face moulded into the enamel of a bath have broken through the mutual incomprehension of patients in constant pain and their doctors. "The results are fascinating," said Charles Pither, a consultant in pain relief at St Thomas' hospital, London, who worked with artist Deborah Padfield "They allow the sufferer to tell me something that I have seldom got solely from listening to a narrative."

Forty of the most telling images created by Ms Padfield, a former actor left in chronic pain after surgery, go on show this week at the Thackray medical museum in Leeds (until May 4).

Each was created in collaboration with other long-term victims at St Thomas', where Ms Padfield finally found effective treatment 10 years ago.

"I was encouraged to draw continually," she said. "It made me aware of the beneficial role that visual images can play. And I wondered: could photographs act as a tool for patients to communicate and their doctors to 'understand' their experience?"

Ten volunteers worked with Ms Padfield for a month. One image began as a montage of a rubbish dump, which grew as the patient and Ms Padfield added more and more clips of medications and treatments. Another, the jacket of jagged shards of glass, drew on the Greek myth of the shirt of Nessus, impregnated with poisoned blood, which slowly killed its wearer.

Other photographs use more predictable imagery, closely related to written descriptions of physical agony, such as needles, barbed wire and red hot knives.

Dr Pither said: "The pictures force attention and interest from doctors, ending the sense of exclusion and loneliness which is part of the misery of chronic pain."

Frances Cole, a pain specialist at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said that a local survey had found one in three of all people to have long-term pain: "It's our commonest symptom, but it is so often 'invisible' - difficult to explain to family and friends, as well as health staff."