Patience

PATIENCE

"what the hell's happened to me?
that rush towards the remember..."

Lottery funding through 'Awards for All' has just been confirmed for the new arthur+martha project PATIENCE, an insider’s guide to illness using poetry and art. Patients can share experiences of living with ill health. For staff, it will be a chance to pass on their insights into caring for others - and the emotional cost.

We would like to invite submssions to blog address http://patience-project.blogspot.com/ as part of gathering insider accounts of illness. If you, or anyone you know, would like to send material to the blog, we would be delighted to receive it. Please circulate this information to anyone you think might be interested. The PATIENCE collection will particularly focus on the experiences of older people. It will be published as a set of pamphlets and a book and also documented online.

Art is capable of depicting the impossible or invisible: hope, pain, joy, fear… states and emotions sometimes inescapable with ill health. We will explore some of our most powerful and yet most elusive moments - times of survival.

Paracetamol Soup, the recent arthur+martha exhibition of work made in healthcare settings, was reviewed in The Guardian (article by Penny Anderson and photostream at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/29/arthur-martha-artists ). The Big Issue will include a feature about arthur+martha and PATIENCE on May 25th.

"a blessing: daffodils
the light, a relief
a relief (the darling)
it comes slowly."

(speak poem, Cherry Tree Hospital , 2009)