Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

I share my story of how using an app on my mobile phone to create digital art, has had a transformative impact on my ability to handle living with a rare illness. I started exploring the digital medium to capture ‘the essence of being a patient’, ‘expressions of illness’ and ‘making sense of illness’. Given that so much of the human experience around the illness is steeped in emotion and complexity, the focus of my art is a self-inquiry into our understandings of identity, art, and illness. The digital medium was the ideal adaptation for me due to limitations in hand function, as it enabled me to create art with minimal physical effort. I would like to see more art in dialogue, communicating and disseminating how art can help friends, family, public, health providers see the multiplicity, the fluid state of the lived experience. Connecting with health teams to highlight how ‘expressions of illness experience’ can open ways of knowing and learning to help clinicians get a deeper understanding of what people go through, the impact illnesses can have on image and identity. This can help bridge the gap between ‘Biomedical and Human focus’. Offer ways of seeing more of the face behind the illness, the person behind it all, not just the person with an illness. A great deal of diagnostic power can be drawn from the visual world, deepening understandings of the ‘human aspect of medical practice’.