Category: Art

Intertwining community, art, and illness: Cancer, interpreted and made visible

• Done during COVID-19 -> social networking effort by Twist Out Cancer -> program called Brushes With Cancer pairing patients with artists to capture cancer experiences
• The program also address the fear, anguish, and isolation/loneliness of cancer

Juliet R. Harrison sent me an art object that made the darkness visible. She had gutted the book — cut into its cover, torn out most of its pages — and then sutured it back together with splints, paste, fragmented words and wire. Broken, hollowed and rebound, it concretized the evisceration I had tried to protest.

Susan Gubar, speaking about her cancer memoir being rendered into an art piece.

• Reflections:
  • Experiences are turned into storytelling which are then made physical through art
  • Transformative capacity of multimedia portrayals
  • Having someone else interpret cancer patients’ stories through art can be therapeutic and illuminating -> the patient can see their own stories and experiences reflected through someone else’ eyes -> the artist, while an outsider to the cancer experience, can act as a mirror to the patient

• Stigma and shame/embarrassment following installment of stoma bag post-surgery
  • Stoma bag/ colostomy bag: pouch that fits over stoma and collects urine + feces to divert flow from bowel or bladder
• Mills survived stage 3 cancer and wanted to embrace the outcome of the surgery fully, posing as iconic figures while keeping a spotlight for her stoma bag instead of hiding it

“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Yes, it will change your body but it’s not anything that you can’t overcome.”

Mills, https://www.survivornet.com/articles/a-colon-cancer-survivor-posed-as-famous-figures-in-incredible-photo-shoot-to-obliterate-the-shame-of-her-stoma-bag/

• Reflections:
  • Colon cancer, compared to others, isn’t as talked about or present in media or the larger public conversations.
    • Indignity of symptoms, post-surgery outcomes viewed as embarrassing and awkward to mention
  • When thinking of cancer, people often think of breast, cervical and ovarian cancer and don’t think of cancers of lung, colon, prostate, liver or stomach- deem to be less common and harder to diagnose as intestinal disorders
    • Visibility as important in both medical sphere and non-medical sphere -> representation brings attention and consequently changes