Empowering those with experiences of illness, disability, and caretaking with the materials and know-how to create artists’ books.
Educating future and present healthcare professionals using these multi-sensory objects.
Project Description:
Embodied Books is a two-part research project into the intersections of art and medicine, known as the health humanities. The first part of the project is a series of workshops to create handmade artists’ books that combine text, image, gesture, and multi-sensory artistry with those who identify as having experiences navigating the healthcare system. The second part is to mobilize these creations as primary resources of patient experience in the education of future and current healthcare professionals.
What can we learn about patient experiences through tangible, sensory, and shareable first-person artists’ books that would be impossible fully comprehend otherwise?
Get the Book:
The foundational research that inspired the Embodied Books project has now been published as a monograph through Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
About Darian:
Dr. Darian Goldin Stahl is an interdisciplinary printmaker, bookmaker, and health humanities researcher. She received a research-creation PhD in Humanities on the topic of artists’ books on illness from Concordia University in Montreal, an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta, and a BFA in Printmaking from Indiana University Bloomington. Darian is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Northern British Columbia’s Northern Medical Program. She lives in Kelowna, which is located in the unceded traditional lands of the Syilx (Okanagan) people.
Darian’s artistic practice blends the images of materials of medical research, including hospital gowns, biomedical imaging scans, scientific instruments, and historical images of anatomy, to explore the role of art to connect researchers with those who seek healing. Darian exhibits her artwork internationally, including solo and small group exhibitions at C.C. Cazona in Santander, Spain; Alberta Printmakers in Calgary, Canada; and the Medical Museum of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, USA. All of Darian’s artist’s books were acquired by the Wellcome Collection Trust in London in 2019, where they continue to evoke health discourses with public audiences. Please visit her website to learn more: www.dariangoldinstahl.com