Introduction to the Exhibit
In this art exhibit, we showcase participant-artists’ work to illuminate our research findings about a novel therapy group that integrated mindfulness practices with expressive art forms to help people process their cancer experiences. The 32 participant-artists engaged in mindfulness practices in the group, and expressed themselves in various artistic activities. You can see many examples of their artwork here in this online manifestation of a physical exhibition.
In the first section of the exhibition, you will view collections or collages of images created by participants which illustrate particular research findings. Next is a section displaying the body outlines. The exhibit concludes with a series of mandalas. In addition to viewing the artwork, we have provided interpretive text to help you engage with the exhibit. We also created an audio guide to elucidate the meanings of the artwork and our research findings. We highly recommend you read the text before you listen to the audio guide provided for each section.
We hope you enjoy our exhibit.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge and thank the participant-artists who generously shared their time, experiences, and artwork with us. Thank you to Hyeon Jeong Choi who designed the online exhibit, Cathy AJ Hardy who narrated the audio guide, the actors who read the participants’ quotes, and Zaeya Winter who created the collages. We are also grateful to the George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Trinity Western University audiovisual staff for their support.
Research team
Kendra Rieger,
Tom Hack,
Miriam Duff,
Patrick Faucher,
Alysha Creighton,
Mandy Archibald,
Amie Zaborniak, and
Christina West.
Scroll Down to See Collages
Experiencing the Integration of Mindfulness and the Expressive Arts
Combining mindfulness practices and art making became a powerful way of discovering and processing hidden thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness meditation enabled participants to let go of their ruminations and calm their minds so they could fully engage in expressive arts activities.
Images and insights came to participants during mindfulness, and were then integrated into their expressive artwork. This challenging work created a unique healing space for meaning-making processes, in which to address their main concern of “How do I now live?” after cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Sometimes your thoughts are up and down…as you meditate those lines become less up and down and more constant…it helps you tap into your inner self, your intuition.
Collage Two
Re-envisioning Personal Identity Within Disruption and Loss
A disorienting season of diagnosis, treatment, and loss left participants wondering, “Am I someone else or am I still me?” In this group, participants artistically expressed what they loved, and reclaimed aspects of themselves they thought they had lost.
Having this imaginal space to depict their lives beyond cancer disrupted its dominant, all-consuming position in their lives, which was essential for realizing who they are now and how to move forward.
I think that it helped to open up my world up again. Because you have to think about the cancer. Like you don’t want to, but you have to think about it. And then it’s like no, no, it’s me, I’m here. Thank God.
Collage Three
You look at it after…and you can see what you are feeling but you couldn’t put those words to it…You have this tornado that kinda swirls around you and you’re taken off track…I feel like you get these things off your chest and feel lighter, without necessarily having to feel like you just talked and talked and talked
Creating a Fitting Container for the Exploration of Diverse Emotions
Participants valued artistic expressions for providing a container in which they could illustrate, inspect, and process complex emotions. Many people had buried their emotions to stay strong during treatment. Within a supportive mindfulness and art-making space, participants moved from being trapped in a web of words to unearthing and acknowledging a myriad of conscious and subconscious emotions.
Participants valued alternative, artistic languages that assisted them to externalize complex emotions into a physical form, which changed their perception of their emotions, and allowed them to share their experiences with others.
Collage Four
Seeing and Revisiting Difficult Experiences Held Within the Complexity and Sensitivity of Art
Participants entered an imaginative space through mindful artmaking which enabled the sensitive exploration of losses and difficult experiences. Artistic elements such as colour, texture, and images were layered to convey nuanced experiences. Participants embodied physical symptoms and changes in their artwork, acknowledging their new realities.
They were carried back to different points in time within their cancer experiences where they had navigated challenges. This revisiting was not always easy but facilitated a deeper processing than had been previously possible.
This medication that I’m on really affected my ring finger on my right hand…This is the pain that I was feeling that day. And I hate it because I’m right-handed, and I have to hold my paint brushes.
Collage Five
Visualizing Hope and Healing – Casting Forward an Artistic Vision for the Future
Participants visualized healing by adding symbols of hope to their artwork, which opened their minds to new possibilities. Through creating art, a participant found a space to “get back to a place where I could continue living.” This sentiment was echoed by other participants in the group as they envisioned their identities and lives beyond cancer.
Participants imagined what their future could look like and gave tangible artistic form to emerging desires and future plans. They also illustrated what they needed for healing and to feel more hopeful for the future.
In the midst of chaos there is hope…I see them both.
There’s a chaos but there’s that light behind it
Body Outlines
Body Outlines
Meaning Making
through Personal Reflection on Artwork
Tap to see the text
Participants often expressed their first instinct in their artwork, and then reflected on their work to understand the meaning of what they had made. The tangible art piece embodied peoples’ experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and could be inspected to facilitate in-depth reflections. For example, when reflecting on the elements in this body outline, the participant noted how the house in the right corner was a symbol of safety to her: “And then we were tucking our body in a safe place and my house is always my safe place.”
One participant shared deep insights when reflecting on her body outline: “I realize how encompassing the experience was. How difficult it was to reach out of that level of physical confrontation of my own body with itself. I am reaching. Getting to the art group was a reach…I felt isolated, and I did these things to reach to community in order to have some sense of being understood.”
Group Sharing, Bearing Witness, and Bonding in a Multimodal Way
Participants found that this group enabled a distinctive, effective approach to connecting with others, one that was stronger than other support groups that focused primarily on verbal conversation. Many attributed this group bonding to being able to show what they were thinking and feeling through what they created. Sharing their art, and explaining the story behind it, became a “jumping off point” for connecting. One participant shared how showing her artwork was personally transformative: “Being able to share with the other women what my body looked like was a big step in the right direction for me. It was the first time…and the fact that I was able to share it with them was one of the biggest parts in my journey. And to accepting cancer and moving on.”
Sharing art and witnessing others’ work powerfully facilitated group bonding. For example, participants worked with a partner to trace their body outlines in a position that had meaning for them and then all group members’ outlines were placed side by side on the wall. One participant shared what she noticed when they were all lined up: “It’s like there’s another being in the room. It was like you’re all just looking at each other, it’s like wow.”
Mandalas
Mandalas
Mandalas Learnings and Benefits for Restoration After Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment
Relational Connections
Meaning making through mindfulness practices and artistic expression resulted in several important learnings and benefits, which are illuminated by these mandalas. An important outcome for participants was no longer feeling alone, because of an increased sense of relational connectedness. This participants’ mandala represented this new sense of connection, “And I don’t ever have to worry, because I have support… This flower is me and this is my support system… And something that I’m going to have through my life now that’s a symbol of I’m not alone.”
Embracing a new mindset to move forward through engaging in artistic play
After a traumatic time, participants highly valued taking a break “from the seriousness of cancer” while engaging in the playfulness of the arts. This momentary reprieve within the rhythm of artmaking helped them to face their cancer experiences in new ways and embrace new perspectives. One person shared about the artmaking, “you get into a rhythm, and you just kinda lose yourself in it.” She explained the meaning of her mandala, called “The Eye of the Storm,” in which she illustrated new insights received in this space: “The supports and who I am, the stuff at the bottom here, is way stronger and more vibrant than any storm… And the clouds just kind of go and fade away and there’s the storm of the cancer that forms the clouds and then they’re going away.”
Discovering Intuition and Personal Resources
Participants encountered their intuition and internal wisdom as they meditated, created, and reflected. This process resulted in a growing awareness of internal strengths they could draw on for recovery. It also built people’s confidence, and many experienced a restored identity. One participant shared how her mandala was “like those cooking shows where they make dishes that are supposed to represent them on a plate and…this represents me on a plate…It’s like holding everything that’s important to me.” Creating it helped her to “keep close to me so I don’t forget what’s really important.”
Learning an Emotional Language for Expressing and Understanding
Most participants described learning a new language for expressing complex emotions, which enabled “a way to deal with those emotions…a way to move on.” Expressing emotions that had been suppressed was particularly cathartic, and once they were expressed, participants realized that “they didn’t have that power over me.” The creator of this mandala shared how she learned to express her emotions through the nuances of the arts. She integrated different colours to show that “There’s good, there’s bad. There’s joy. There’s sadness…you have to deal with whatever life throws at you.” She shared how the colours changed according to emotions she has experienced at different life stages, for example, gold representing happiness and hope.
Learning what I Need to Heal and Care for Self
Many participants shared how they desired to continue with mindfulness and the expressive arts for self-care and coping with the challenges of living with cancer. They also depicted learnings about what they needed to care for themselves through incorporating symbols into their mandalas. This participant shared that the sparrow, lily, and moon in her mandala all had meaning related to self-care, nurturing and strength for recovery, and stated that “I’d like my mandala to help me to heal my body and spirit of the angst and anxiety and unsettled sense.”
Fostering Gratitude and Hope
The group fostered gratefulness about what was good in participants’ experiences and an awareness of the beauty within their chaos, as one person reflected, “I think that I just started remembering that it wasn’t all dark.” Through meditation and the expressive arts, people received hopeful metaphors and often integrated them into their mandalas. This participant reflected on three symbols for healing in her mandala, which fostered hope: the lotus flower, which illustrated her “emotional pain and how many layers” it had, the vibration of a singing bowl, which “represented healing and life and energy,” and a shell, which depicted the “many aspects of my identity” which she had not lost despite having cancer.
Conclusion
Thank you for engaging with the art and voice of these participant-artists.
To learn more about our research, please visit artsforequity.ca