Background
Advanced cancer diagnoses are often accompanied by profound disruption of identity, marked by diminished autonomy, reduced agency, and the reconfiguration of personal roles and priorities. Recognising the cathartic potential for narrative expression to organise complex emotional experience, enhance resilience and alleviate psychological distress, this project explores community-engaged approaches in cancer care through the use of person-centred narrative and art-making in the ‘sensemaking’ processes of patients receiving end-of-life care. This is underpinned by the role of art in trauma narrativisation and expression, including the personal and social benefits of advanced cancer care practices that are person-centred.
Methods
With the pilot funded by a University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) Centre for Culture and Heritage, it designs and delivers a Queensland-based person-centred narrative and legacy artmaking intervention to advanced cancer patients at UniSQ. Each participant engages in a 2.5-hour storytelling workshop, followed by a 2.5-hour legacy-building art workshop, facilitated by the UniSQ research team in consultation with cancer care professionals. These workshops culminate in a curated exhibition of participant artworks and art books hosted at Toowoomba Regional Gallery. By capturing person-centred legacy art stories, this project provides insight into how art-making fosters regional wellbeing ecologies via creative interventions and external partnerships.
Impact on Practice
In this study, the processes of person-centred story-telling and legacy art-making emerge as significant means through which individuals may reassert agency, bear witness to their experiences, and reclaim a sense of presence in the face of overwhelming and often unspeakable realities.
Discussion
First-hand accounts and expressions of living with cancer provide insight into end-of-life-care in the regional context – especially in terms of personal, socio- cultural exploration of wellbeing via creative community interventions and external partnerships – and preserve knowledge that would be otherwise lost or discarded in current care practices.