You are invited to the Cancer + Art Studio exhibition of works June 2.
The Creative Arts Cottage opened in October 2011, offering expressive arts groups for non-artists. In 2012 Art Therapist Jody Thomson began the Cancer + Art Studio – a Free art studio days for people living with a cancer diagnosis.
This new initiative was funded by Cancer Council NSW Western Region (and proudly auspiced by The GroundSwell Project!). It provided a confidential and supportive environment where people living with cancer can explore their cancer journey and discover the life-affirming power of creative expression.
The GroundSwell Project congratulates Jody and The Creative Arts Cottage.
Recently the GroundSwell Project celebrated another birthday. Cake and bubbly set the tone for the morning. The occasion was marked with stories, pictures and significant contributions from special guests. Particular thanks to Robyn and friends from Busting Cancer, as well as to Sebastian Robertson, our special guest speaker from Batyr. Thanks too to Kerrie Noonan, our director, who somehow found time to whip up this prize-worthy GroundSwell-themed butter-cake.
The Drama Project is now in its third year at Penrith High School. Last year the theme was organ donation and back in 2010, our very first year, we brought people living with Motor Neurone Disease into the classroom to share their stories as the foundation of this group theatre-making project. In each case, the finished production was staggeringly successful, both as an assessable piece of “drama” for the individual Year Eleven students involved and as a life-affirming learning experience for audiences and the broader community around them.
This year we brought something new out of the box! (Boom! Boom!) Our creative process asked the students to have a close look at the concept of The Funeral. A very close look, involving an actual coffin, an actual hearse, an actual funeral director. And an actual funeral director’s actual son.
None of these are actually pictured here.
Instead, you see evidence of the play-building intensive yours truly was privileged to conduct with these young people last Friday and Saturday at Penrith High and environs. Over two sessions we teased out many of the core images, ideas, and issues their research thus far has unearthed and explored different ways of giving these concrete and performable shape. By the end of the weekend there was a strong sense of the (funereal) directions this new work may ultimately take. It’s up to the drama class of 2012 now to pull the work together.
As ever, The Groundswell Project doffs its hat to Penrith High School, and sends our thanks to drama teachers Nic Bonfield, and Melissa Jacob for leading their students where many others might fear to tread.
The Melbourne chapter of the GroundSwell Project (your correspondent) is Penrith-bound tomorrow for an important weekend in the GroundSwell calendar. It will feature one birthday and a funeral…
The Funeral is a work-in-progress, presently being created by Year 11 drama students at Penrith High School. This is the third in our series of creative partnerships withe Drama department at the school, and it’s always an extremely satisfying experience to work with these young people and their teachers as they crystallise their responses to challenging ideas about death and dying and grief and loss into the concrete, spatial poetry of performance.
And of course, sandwiched in between our two scheduled, somewhat funereal sessions at the school, we have our happy birthday celebrations at Penrith Library on Saturday morning from 10am. We look forward to sharing a slice of cake and some stories with you as we reflect on our work these past years.
No need to bring a cake. The fairy bread is on us! See you there.
One of the reasons The GroundSwell Project exists is to talk about the elephant in the room and we are amongst some very fine company. One such organisation is Batyr and founder and Social Entrepreneur of the Year Sebastian Robertson will be our special guest speaker at our birthday next weekend.
Batyr exists to engage, educate and empower young people to speak out about social and mental health issues. To foster an environment where seeking help and talking about mental health is not only acceptable but is encouraged and supported. Batyr’s aim is to connect secondary and tertiary students with young speakers who have had a social or mental health experience and? educate students about the support networks and systems available to them and in doing so, empowering students to reach out when they need to.
Sebastian’s decision to start Batyr, at only 25, was driven by a passion to engage, educate, and empower young people to confront and accept difficult social issues ranging from depression and anxiety to sexuality. This passion came from his experience of dealing with depression whilst studying at university and holding major leadership roles. He decided that unless he spoke out about his ‘success story’ that he was only adding to the stigma that stopped him asking for help when he needed it.
After graduating from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Economics and a Bachelor of Commerce (finance, accounting and international business) he joined the Financial Management Program with General Electric. Constantly involved in various extra-curricular programs including extensive volunteering, Sebastian recognised the role social enterprises play in creating a positive society and wanted to do more to contribute to this movement.
In 2011 he was chosen as an Australian Youth Representative for the Commonwealth Youth Forum and was awarded a ‘Time to Shine’ Award for his work to date with Batyr by his local community in Sydney. He was also awarded Sydney’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 by the School for Social Entrepreneurs.
Sebastian hopes to use his passion and skills in business to develop a sustainable social enterprise that creates a platform for other young people to help continue ‘giving a voice to the elephant in the room’. He loves to enjoy life and is still surprised that ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ have not asked him on as a guest star…
Join us: Saturday the 28th of April
10-12 at Penrith Library
Please RSVP and while you do please consider making a tax deductible donation to support our community work either here on eventbrite or HERE on the GiveNow website.
‘Stir the Pot‘ is a night of presentations, provocations & discussion about innovative end of life & after death care practices in Australia.
There is a quiet revolution happening in Australia – green funerals and Eco ‘Garments for the Grave‘, funeral ceremonies in public spaces (including parks, surf clubs and art galleries), people are dying at home and families are organising their own funerals (yes! without a funeral director), ethereal ‘human rooms‘ are being designed in palliative care spaces, choirs are singing to the dying, and ‘cooling tables’ are enabling families to care directly for their dead at home. Water cremation is even on the way!
Want to know more?
‘Stir the Pot‘ is for practitioners as well as for interested citizens, keen to have more open and deeper conversations about end of life issues and how this aspect of our lives can be better for all involved.
Most of us only talk about death when we have to.
After all, it’s something most of us know very little about.
Few of us have been present with the dying, or cared for the dying or seen our loved ones “laid out” after death. Death often takes us by surprise and we find ourselves organising funerals when we are in the midst of numbing and unexpected grief.
So it’s hardly surprising that when death occurs it’s not uncommon for people to describe feeling helpless and uncertain: Who do we call on for help? What’s required when someone is dying or has just died?
I’m fortunate to be involved in a research project at the University of Western Sydney
with Dr Debbie Horsfall and Assoc. Prof Rosemary Leonard. We are looking at the experiences of care networks. We defined ‘care network’ as the group of friends, family, neighbours and other informal caregivers and supporters who gather around and support the primary caregiver when someone with a terminal illness is being cared for at home. We presented the preliminary results at the Australian and New Zealand Third Sector Conference last month and one of the key findings I presented on was death literacy.
Everything changes, it seems, once you have cared for someone who is dying.
Many people in care networks report that their knowledge and death and dying “grew” over the time they were part of this care network. It’s clear that they are empowered by what they learnt about the dying process, caring at end-of-life, as well as post-death practices such as keeping a person at home after death, organising funerals and so on. But it doesn’t stop there. Other knowledge is acquired as they learnt to navigate the “system” – how to organise the in-home medical and nursing care needed, how to ask for and get help (or not!) from friends and family, and how to have conversations about end-of-life decisions.
We called this new knowledge ‘death literacy’ because what we heard again and again in our focus groups with members of these care networks was people saying “I never knew… but now I do…”
The term Death literacy like Health Literacy acknowledges that knowledge has an impact on well-being.
So while this research brought to life the so called “ordinary” tasks of caring for people who are dying at home, it also highlighted how much knowledge about death and dying we are losing as a community. This point was amplified this weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald Series: The End, which includes an excellent suite of articles and multimedia presentations about the end of life in Australian Society.
A couple of facts that stand out:
Intensive care beds and interventions are increasing and more of us are dying surrounded by technology
By 2030 there will be 8 deaths per 1000 and 10 years later this will be almost 10 per 1000. (it’s currently 6.5 per 1000)
So… Are you death-literate? And if so…
Where have you gained your knowledge of dying from? What knowledge and skills did you learn as a result?
And if not:
Do you know where to get information about caring for a dying loved one?
Do you know what to do if a loved one dies expectedly at home?
If you needed to organise a funeral do you know how?
Who are the friends, family and community that you can call on for support?
Have you discussed your personal wishes about aged-care (in home or not), organ donation, and your advance care directive with family?
At GroundSwell we are interested sharing, promoting and undertaking community programs that are demystifying death and end of life practices. We encourage you to think about how you might develop your knowledge and know-how.
Talking about our end-of -life wishes isn’t always easy but the benefits of having this conversation can be profound. This video from TEDxNewy features Dr Peter Saul an ICU Specialist from Newcastle. It’s had almost 8000 hits since December (post update… it’s now almost 65,000!). Amazing!!!
Peter is able to weave life lessons and clinical insights into a very thoughtful and entertaining talk about death! His idea – an “occupy death” movement – is the kind of creative out-of-the-box thinking we LOVE here at GroundSwell too. Why not!!!
With National Palliative Care Week on the way in May, this video could easily get a new round of hits and applause. The theme of the week this year is “Some things are too important to be left unsaid – Let’s chat about dying”. So, get involved and arrange an event in your workplace, your school, or the local shops!
If you are still stuck, try calling your local Hospital and ask the Intensive Care Unit or Palliative Care Unit for a guest speaker – these people know their stuff!
Have you had “the talk” with someone? How did you start? Please share your tips and your challenges with us.
This photo has nought to do with anything, and as for the title of this post… ?
Well, it’s my writerly way of trying to capture your interest in reading this excellent piece in today’s Age newspaper by palliative care nurse, and novelist, Steven Amsterdam. Medicine and metaphors…..
Please join us on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 – 5:30pm to 8:00pm, for a night of presentations, provocations & discussion about innovative end of life & after death care practices. Invited presenters will speak to their area of practice, art form or idea for social change and innovation. This event is designed to open up new possibilities and new discourse around death, dying and bereavement practices.
It is for practitioners as well as for interested citizens, keen to have more open conversations about end of life issues and how this aspect of our lives can be better for all involved.
Come ‘stir the pot’ and experience new possibilities and new discourses.
Places are strictly limited. Tickets available here
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