A CBC News report and article (November 2018) called “Beauty Out of Pain: Canadian soldiers' embroidery was therapy for the scars of war” describes how embroidery helped men dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the scars of the First World War. For those 145 men involved in creating the alter piece, housed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the embroidery was “something which they were able to focus on to create, to lift them out of the awfulness of what they'd experienced”. It is stunningly beautiful.
What do a soldier and a 16-year old female heart transplant recipient have in common? A great video called Can Art Be Medicine? by The Foundation For Art & Healing explores how art can help diverse populations.
When I visited the Royal British Museum in 2007, all of my attention was seized by the installation “Cradle to Grave” by Pharmacopoeia, in which 28,000 pills were sewn into fabric in rows to represent the consumption of medicine by an average man and woman in the UK. “People love to take medicine. Our imaginations have allowed us to dream of finding compounds that will relieve our pain and suffering.” The artwork of Pharmacopoeia engages viewers in the debate around our relationship with medical treatments, encouraging us to examine our own medical and pharmacological history. All of Pharmacopoeia’s art installations are built with pharmaceutical pills and capsules (see the Artworks and Exhibitions pages of their website). They are moving works of art in themselves, and they also beg the question: Why do we depend on pills to heal us instead of healing ourselves with art?