Category Art, Illness, and Healthcare

Medicine often prides itself on the science that underpins in, but we believe that art is equally important, as a way to understand and change the practice of healthcare. We want to see art as more than a decoration on waiting room walls, we need art to resist, persist and flourish in healthcare. We are interested in what happens when we are not well, and in making sense of illness through art. Art can transgress the patient/professional boundary, helping us to accept that:
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1978.

Arts-based research affords us new ways of seeing illness, disability, trauma and caregiving which can resist or challenge mainstream epistemologies. Arts-based practitioner research can illuminate clinical practice, education and leadership, showing us how to change the culture of healthcare, even (and especially) in times of crisis. Audre Lorde explains how art is necessary for marginalised people:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury, 1985.