The Arts and Disability: In aid of a paradigm shift

Sue Austen has been in a wheelchair since 1996, when she contracted ME. To free herself from its limitations, she has adapted a wheelchair design, creating one that can be used underwater. "Portal" has enabled her to fly underwater. She plays with the notion of transformation: transforming attitudes, preconceived notions of being "wheelchair bound", and notion of disability and limitations.

Have a look at her TED talk and you'll see that, her imagination reflects a courageous and positively empowering woman.

Arts and Climate Change

Marshall McLuhan said, "artists are harbingers of cultural change".  Cape Farewell is a project that brings scientists together with writers, visual artists, musicians, film makers and architects to explore the seas, in order to collectively address and raise awareness of climate change. The brain child of the organization, David Buckland is an artist who has invited other creatives such as writer Ian McEwan, musicians Kt Tunstall and Feist, and sculptor Anthony Gormley onto the ship into the Arctic.  Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey for instance, carved a large lens out of ice and focused images onto large slabs of ice.

Scientists have had the evidence of global warming for years and this project works to provide a creative tool for communicating the need for us all to take heed and shift our practices.

Arts-Informed Research and Cardiology: An Installation

When thinking about using the arts to heal I came across this project by Dr. Jennifer Lapum. I had seen her speak and perform a few years ago when she was in the thick of conducting her research. What follows is another example of the notion of patient-centred care. Like the dementia village about which I wrote last time, this project reflects the notion of art and healing in a very literal sense.

The 7024th Patient is an art installation that communicates research findings by recreating the lived experiences of cardiac patients. The poetry, created from the words of patients recovering from heart surgery, is exhibited alongside photographs displayed in a physical space. In using the arts as a means to disseminate their research findings, this team of researchers fosters an empathetic and embodied response - a humanistic, patient-centred approach to sharing their research findings rather a clinical approach.  The installation is on exhibition at Sunnybrook Health Sciences in Toronto from March 11th.

Dr. Jennifer Lapum the principal investigator is an associate professor at Ryerson as well as a registered nurse in cardiovascular intensive care. She is a poet and a researcher who chooses an arts-based narrative approach to her work.  She is focused on enhancing patients’ overall health while at the same time endeavouring to make sure that no patient feels like a number or “the 7,024^th patient”.  She brings the arts to the health sciences in order to facilitate the medical practitioners’ capacity to become subjective and to see the patient as a person and not just as a number.