Art – Corpus

In the frame

1 March 2021 4 Comments

Trish Harris

Last month I visited the hospital. Even when the reasons are straightforward, the experience is never without echoes.

Frame #1:

I am sitting in the café in Wellington Hospital’s atrium. From my table I can see an inner courtyard of tables and chairs and a sculpture of arches and lintel. The sculpture is actually a section of the old hospital entranceway, a familiar sight from when I was admitted as a child. But I am not a child. In this frame I am a poet, the writer of My Wide White Bed, a book of poems about being in hospital. Today I am here to talk to a staff member about the possibility of framing some of them for display in hospital corridors. Poems that will ring a little bell for today’s inpatients: We have a voice; you are seen. That’s what they’ll trill. Well, that’s the hope.

Frame #2:

After the café meeting, I head to my orthopaedic outpatient’s appointment. In this frame I am a patient. I answer the prioritisation form, trying to make my life fit onto a sliding scale. All I want is a referral to Orthotics, who have made my shoes for the past twenty-five years.

The registrar comes in, offers a smile and handshake. He examines my hands, says good tendons, fingers not crooked. Surgeries? Hips, four, I say, two revisions. He moves to my feet. Flat feet, he says, stiff. What about pain? Difficult to get around? I’ve adapted, I say, it’s different for someone whose life has been upended recently or for whom it keeps changing. I’ve had this for fifty-two years. I know how to do it.

Afterwards I think, why did I go on about coping? A friend says, he was looking at you through one frame and you were trying to get him to look through another.

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DrawThis! Hacking a way out of isolation

11 May 2020 1 Comment

Liz Breslin

What do you do, with these limitations given to you?

It’s a question we’ve been variously asking ourselves these past weeks. There is no right answer. Not King Lear, not sourdough. But isn’t it interesting to notice where we go?

I went to a hackathon in week two of Level Four, I think it was, but pick a number, in these numbered times. I went because something I read said community and connection and because I was missing that and because I was scared to, so I did. A hackathon is a thing where you tech together to create solutions. You have 48 hours to #HacktheCrisis. No pressure. Actually, lots of pressure. Time pressure. Confusion. What was I doing? I rumbled around in a #general zone until I found myself in a team of eight, six of us at our first hackathon, hacking the heck out of an idea that made my heart sing.

Dreaming with my body

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Rata Gordon

“Dreaming with my body” follows on from a previous article by Rata Gordon, “Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood”, which you can read here.

Motherhood is undervalued. And I feel like my culture’s view of what a mother should be is limited. I have a sense of somehow trying to claw back a self that is individuated from my child and active in the public sphere, because the question looms: is being just a mother enough? And what constitutes a good enough mother in the face of climate change, mass extinctions and a global mental health crisis? My child must live in this world.

I am trying to be intimate with the world around me, feeling the sharp edges with my toe and tasting the salt water with my tongue.

I wonder whether Attachment Theory’s usual version of a good enough mother, in terms of wiping your child’s nose, having ordinary devotion, cuts it. How can I nurture not only my own child, but the world that I am bringing her into, and all that I love?

I have found that there is no greater opportunity for being told how to think, act, breathe and scratch my nose than becoming a mother. A whole flurry of social and cultural institutions, norms and practices would like to dictate how I mother, and who I am now that I’m a mother. They land like fine silt, becoming denser and heavier with time if I don’t move beneath them.

I want to feel that the stories I tell are true, but I also want to show that there are other possible untold stories lingering underneath and in between.

Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Rata Gordon

Baby Ursula eating a page of careful research.

It’s dark. I can hear the whirr of the heater and an eager bird outside. The others are still asleep and I have sneaked down here to write. I recently described my tiredness as desperate. There are very few things I would give up sleep for at the moment, but one of them is writing. When I do it right, it gives me energy, rather than taking it away.

Writing that feels good to do is full-bodied. It comes from my slippered ankles, my warm insides, the space between my fingers, my chilly nape. It plants words that are alive on the page. Writing that feels bad to do – the kind that gives me a neck ache – feels like forming boring biscuits from just my brain.

Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” Hélène Cixous.

Ursula is nearly one now and my body has been ballooning out, birthing, spouting milk, withering, coming back to life. All I have is the time before she wakes up to do this, so I’m going to have to just let it slip out somehow. Speak, body!

The treasures we surround ourselves with …

24 September 2018 3 Comments

Max Reid

woodcut by Janet de Wagt — Woodcut by Janet de Wagt

Some years ago, I was managing a large not-for-profit aged residential care facility in Wellington. We offered a range of rest home, hospital and dementia level care, and we were operating in a very competitive market, a market increasingly dominated by private ‘for profit’ aged care providers.

A perennial question for organisations in the aged residential care sector – be they private or not-for-profit – is, ‘What makes what we offer distinctive?’ Even earlier in my career, while undertaking a business degree, I remember a marketing lecturer defining the three key aspects of ‘market distinctiveness’:

You have to be either the biggest, demonstrably the best, or the most innovative.”

Sound enough concepts in themselves, perhaps, but somewhat difficult in a sector (like aged residential care) where virtually every aspect of the service you provide is detailed in standardised specifications and contracts, and then audited to within an inch of a contract’s life.

Knitting an anatomy of loss

20 August 2018 3 Comments

Michele Beevors

After Stubbs, The Wreck of Hope, by Michele Beevors, at The Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, New Zealand 2014

As adults we must all at some point endure grief, although the loss of a loved one affects each of us differently. For some people knitting can provide a lifeline that helps to process loss, a mechanism by which the knitter can deal with overwhelming sadness, and a way to mark off the time it takes to heal. This was my experience. Knitting provided me with a safety net and a way of reconstructing my life, a turn from the personal space of grief to the political realm of art.

Knitting carries with it the legacy of care (for it takes time to knit by hand), patience, empathy and love. Hundreds of knitting patterns have been passed down through generations, one to the next. Knitting can be a powerful metaphor for sustainability, continuity and remembrance, and also for loss.

I began by knitting a single human skeleton, and went on from there to knit a skeleton of a horse (a memory of a school museum visit), then a snake, a dolphin, kangaroos, emu, frogs and children. Thirteen years later, I am still knitting, and the work is ever more urgent.