You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘pain’ tag.
FANTASTIC NEWS FOR THE DRAWING WOMENS’ CANCER PROJECT! (check it out on the project site)
The book, Like Any Other Woman is to be published by Cardiff University Press: https://www.cardiffuniversitypress.org/ this autumn!
Written by myself in collaboration with Rebecca Phillips, the first woman to be involved with the project. Like Any Other Woman creatively and movingly documents Becky’s story, along with those of several other women who contributed to the project.
At twenty-four, four months before her wedding, she was diagnosed with vulval cancer, an ‘old ladies disease’. She wrote about her pain, her hopes, her fears, and her writing is too authentic not to be heard on its own terms. We agreed that I would write a book in which I would express through words (both hers and mine) and imagery, her experiences and the resonances with those of other women who have similar conditions.
Like Any Other Woman speaks to the suffering that cancer causes, to the profound human experience of re-negotiating the physical and emotional balance between sickness and health when that balance is tipped by the onset of disease. It is not a book about cancer itself, the etiological world of causes and symptoms. It is not about biomedical interventions that characterise individual treatment. It is about what it feels like when all sense of normality, all expectations of a future, suddenly become submerged in degrees of suffering that impact both on the individual, and on those who care for and about her.
Here is an open invitation to all to a new exhibition at The Broadway Drawing School Gallery.
‘A Long Table of Curiosities’ showcases recent anatomical works, mostly life size, that pay due respect to the skill and craft element of historical wax modelling but which are completely contemporary in the way they are presented. The sculptures will constitute a new body of work, derived from drawings and studies that I have been working on in various medical museums, dissecting labs and mortuaries over recent years. Far from being gruesome or morbid, I hope these sculptures will demonstrate how a symbiotic relation between artistic expression and scientific knowledge has the potential to evoke a profound emotional response, whilst posing the question of how we, as human beings, can be at the same time so very different and yet so very much the same.
‘A Long Table of Curiosities’ is kindly sponsored by Made in Roath 2017, which is a week long arts festival in the Roath area of Cardiff. The exhibition will run throughout the Festival week 16th – 22nd October, 10-4pm each day.
The Broadway Drawing School is also part of MiR OPEN STUDIOS WEEKEND 21-21 Oct. 10-4pm.
This is the continuing work in progress of a life-size figure that I am modelling in wax. The title of the piece, ‘without consent’, alludes to many issues around women, and women’s health, that have given me pause in the work that do.
More news is that I have just signed up to do a Postgraduate course in human anatomy with Edinburgh University! I have finally decided to take the plunge and study the subject more deeply so that I keep on developing my work and also enhance my teaching abilities in the anatomy for artists course that I run at The Broadway Drawing School here in Cardiff.
Here is my very first attempt at modelling with wax. I have a lot of experience with clay but thought I would try a new material. I’ve found that I prefer the wax…it allows me much more detail and for the particular work I do – where I need to express as much emotion as I can in the figure – it is a much better medium. I built the skull first and then laid on the muscles and the flesh as in an ecorche. I finished the piece over three days of work. This first effort will definitely not be the last!
The piece is based on Kostoglotov, the main protagonist in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. He and I have become close friends since I have been drawing and painting him for the Cancer Ward 12 project!
Even though the Cancer Ward 12 show is now over the project continues. I am working on a publication relating to the work done to date. This, alongside a book based on the Drawing Women’s Cancer project is keeping me busy, but I still need to draw and paint, (and now model with wax ), the emotional spaces in between scientific anatomy and existential experience to keep my creative insanity at an acceptable level!
So, the Cancer Ward 12 Exhibition at the Dynevor Centre Gallery is now closed but you can see it on the new exhibition page on my other project site https://cancerward12.wordpress.com
Once there just click the appropriate heading on the page menu and do scroll down as there is lot to see!
The exhibition might be over but the work continues. I am currently putting together a publication based on the project which will be available in e-book and print format. More on that very soon.
I hope that you enjoy the page and that it provides some feel of the physical exhibition. Please do send comments/feedback either by posting here or contact me directly: jacsaorsa@hotmail.com All such feedback really helps in progressing and developing my work.
Here is a detail of a painting for the Cancer Ward 12 project
Through my work I have seen and experienced much that accords with the worthy aims of medicine as a science that begins with preventing, treating and/or curing illness, and, where cure is not possible, end with facilitating what has been called ‘a good death’. I have also seen and experienced things that have given me pause and reason to question. I will continue questioning on behalf of the patient.
Just got the news yesterday that I have a small amount of funding to carry out a project that is close to my heart and I have been thinking about for ages! I am of course delighted that I’ll finally be able to realise Cancer Ward 12 working at Singleton Hospital in Swansea. Work is now set to begin in November this year with an exhibition scheduled for June 2017. More details later but for now here is a brief summary of the idea.
Cancer Ward 12 draws on literature (The Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pub. 1967) and on life. It is a project that, as a discrete piece of research in its own right, carried out at Singleton hospital in Swansea, has enormous potential to further develop into a comparative study. There are two parts:
The first part involves my ‘immersion’ into the day-to-day life on the Oncology Ward of Singleton Hospital, which is a thirty bed, general oncology/haematology ward where patients with a variety of cancers and disease related symptoms are treated and cared for. Working directly with consenting patients and their family members/carers, and with health professionals and hospital staff I will document what I see and experience through drawing and written narrative. I will use a ‘narrative medicine’ approach to gather individual experiences of illness, and of different forms of giving and receiving treatment.
The second part of the project will involve developing all the notes and sketches made on site as a basis for creating a substantial a body of work for public exhibition.
Dis/FIGURATION 