The “Written Frisbee”: The Art of Performing Care at a Distance (original) (raw)
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This article examines a new mode of communicating illness: graphic medicine or auto/pathography, biographies and autobiographies about the experience of illness (one’s own or that of another), written in comics form. In auto/pathography, the extreme condition of chronic pain or illness intrudes into the everyday, and the representation of this extreme is the subject of the article. The article demonstrates how the extreme is constituted by multiple temporalities, new protocols of engagement with everyday objects, the eversion of interiority, even as the narrative is cast as a sentimental one. Finally, it also unpacks the attempts by the sick to retain or assert a measure of agency in the face of illness.
Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
This paper explores how the writing of art therapy clinical notes can be a creative practice and discusses implications for associated therapeutic work. The author argues that the process of writing clinical notes, as well as the aesthetic qualities of the notes which are produced, can be considered as part of the wider artistry of the art therapist. Through reflections on her own experiences of clinical note writing, the author describes how a creative approach to this activity might benefit the therapeutic process and be helpful to other professionals involved in a client's care. R ESUM E Cet article explore comment la r edaction de notes cliniques en art-th erapie peut constituer une pratique cr eative et aborde ce que cela implique pour le travail th erapeutique associ e. L'auteure soutient que le processus d' ecriture de notes cliniques, de même que les qualit es esth etiques des notes produites, peuventêtre consid er es comme faisant partie du savoirfaire artistique du th erapeute. A travers des r eflexions sur ses propres exp eriences de r edaction de notes cliniques, l'auteure d ecrit comment une approche cr eative de cette activit e pourrait s'av erer b en efique pour le processus th erapeutique et aider les autres professionnels impliqu es dans les soins d'un client.
[Graphic Medicine] Spaces of Care and Graphic Medicine
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
While there are several studies that focus on care settings in relation to verbal narratives, only a few studies have paid attention to how comics in general, and graphic medicine in particular, engage critical care environments and settings. Drawing strengths from the underground and alternative comics and capitalizing on health humanities, graphic medicine, a recent development in the comics genre, concentrates on the issues related to health, illness, and care. Coined by Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine refers to the intersection of comics and concerns of healthcare. Graphic medicine has always engaged informal, formal, and biomedical caregiving settings. Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on spatial studies and care, examines Stan Mack's Janet& Me (2004), Joyce Farmer's Special Exits (2014), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2012). In so doing, the article seeks to delineate care facilities (family, hospitals, among others) and their impact on patients.
Logos Universality Mentality Education Novelty: Philosophy & Humanistic Sciences
The experience we want to report on and about which we are going to start thinking is not entirely new. It has already taken place in several hospitals that deal with medical and surgical resuscitation; many reports of it have been published in medical literature that echoes voices of patients who did fairly well. Psychiatry had already used notebooks for patients, encouraging each of them to keep a diary of which only the author himself and perhaps his doctor and some caregivers had knowledge. But here is what immediately makes the difference between the structure that is fit for the notebooks when they are implemented by Benoît Misset and the structure used in psychiatry. Unlike what happens most of the time in psychiatry, a patient in intensive care is not able to keep a diary. Everything happens as if various characters, who use the pronouns I, we, you, thou, they, she or he, kept the diary for the patient or for themselves, addressing the patient and talking about him. The voic...
[Personal Nature]: An Artist’s Approach to Assistive Technology
Personal Nature] is an artistic intervention rooted in assistive communication technology. By using physiological sensors on the body a sonification is created, this is to amplify the minute non-verbal communication cues found in our heart and breath rates, temperature, and in the amount of moisture found on our skin, all processed through time. The goal of this sonification is to replicate the sounds of a park through real world recordings including birdsong, children's laughter, wind and water as to create a space conductive to communication. The intended user of this technological intervention is a person who is in a coma or is otherwise (seemingly) unresponsive and their loved ones. This article explores the artist's process of using art, design and research methodologies. By looking at the disruption through the lens of different philosophies while considering the benefits of nature, music therapy and communal healing this paper attempts to fully explore aesthetics within the hospitals critical care unit.
[Graphic Medicine] Care objects, Affect and Graphic Medicine
BMJ/Medical Humanities , 2024
Looking beyond anthropocentric care relationships reveals nuanced levels of interdependence among human and non-human entities. Attention to these heterogeneous inter-relationships illuminates the subtle and visceral affective intensities among diverse participants, including humans, objects and the environment, among others. The interdisciplinary field of graphic medicine foregrounds these entanglements through comic affordances, challenging the predominant notion that care belongs only at the scale of human beings. This article analyses selected sections from graphic medical narratives such as Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits to illustrate how objects become a source of care for humans during illness, thus becoming care objects. Furthermore, using the affordances of comics, this essay examines, how the selected sections of the abovementioned graphic narratives portray the often unnoticed/overlooked affective entanglement between the sufferers and objects. In doing so, this article underscores the inter-relatedness between humans and non-human entities within the context of caregiving.
“Illness works to deform and distort all the meaning and value one gives to one’s life” (Ahlzén, 2011, p.325). A feeling of terminal loss is experienced within the physical body as chaos floods the brain. Even language is incapable of fully addressing the internal tension that comes with illness, because it strives to make articulate the unpresentable or the abject. This review is directed towards analysing the experience of embodiment in illness, one’s relation to the self and to others, all within a particular context such as a place of constraint (hospital) or exchange (museum). The mediation between care and art practice, in fact, allows for the emergence of similar states that fluctuate between closeness and distance and between the unpresentable and the presentable as they enter in a process of dialogue. Such states allow the nurse and the artist to engage freely with the Other in a space defined by the intensity of the present moment and its assimilation through the path of narrativity. An empathic audio-visual tool called Sanctuary was created to serve a narrative, the ill person’s narrative. It is presented in the form of a visor which allows the viewer to enter a ‘bunker-like’ space. An empathic encounter with the self, aims to be triggered through the process of participation in the artwork. The play of tension within a restorative, sheltering space is followed with planned empathic dialogue between the nurse and the ill person.