Transforming Lives Through Portrait Therapy
Friday 11 November 2016 to Saturday 7 January 2017
(please note that Sarum College will shut at 4pm on Saturday December 24 and re-open Tuesday, 3 January)
Artist, art therapist and researcher Dr Susan Carr presents more than 30 painted portraits co-designed with patients living with life-threatening and chronic illnesses. For Susan, portraiture is a way of knowing and being when severe illness disrupts a person’s sense of identity.
Carr’s PhD research explored this collaborative and inclusive art therapy for people living with life-threatening and chronic illnesses whose experience disrupts their sense of self-identity – those who say things like “I don’t know who I am anymore” … “I’m not the person I used to be before I was ill,” and “I look in the mirror and I say ‘Who’s that?!’ …”
Through her artistic practice or ‘third hand’, Carr created creates portraits for patients which they co-design, which allows those who are unwell or unwilling to make art themselves to engage in the creative design process.