Volume 9, Number 1, November 1997

Art Exhibition Project - St. Joseph's College Ethics Centre

St. Joseph's College Ethics Centre in collaboration with The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Programme and the Edmonton Art Gallery, is initiating an art exhibition on the theme of "Suffering and Healing in Healthcare."

The goal of this project is to see with new eyes a specific type of suffering experienced in health care. We are not speaking here of bodily pain and how we attempt to address that through high-tech biomedical treatments. We wish to foster expression of the embodied emotional, spiritual and psychological suffering that eludes biomedical treatment. It is the suffering or internal torment experienced when a person's identity is threatened, when one's life or world no longer makes sense, because of serious illness. It involves the relational link between body, spirit, and illness. The suffering of a son or daughter who is deciding to withdraw burdensome treatment from their seriously ill, unconscious parent. The suffering of a woman adjusting her self-identity when she has a mastectomy. The suffering of a physician or nurse who uses all the available resources of good medicine to address the pain and suffering of a patient, yet, the patient still suffers. Medicine knows the necessity of addressing this suffering for the healing and wellness of the person.

Artists have been invited to explore the tension between our attempts to provide healing through "controlling suffering" and our fear over the fact that suffering still persists. Often our fear and lack of understanding of suffering causes us not to discuss it, to deny its existence, or simply distance ourselves from those who are suffering with some threatening illness.

The exhibition will open in Edmonton at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital & Community Health Centre in December 1997, and will tour health care facilities throughout the Province of Alberta. For further information, please contact:

St. Joseph's College Ethics Centre
#520, 8409 - 112 Street
Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 1K6
telephone: (403) 439-2422, fax: (403) 432-0245
e-mail: ethics@connect.ab.ca.

Note: The deadline for submission of visual work was October 1, 1997. No further submissions will be accepted.