Repairing Emotional and Sexual Damage caused by Cancer- International Symposium UCA-University for the Creative Arts

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The presentation to the Damage and Repair symposium attracted an audience of 100 health professional delegates. The presentation by health professionals and artists explained how patients and artists together explored sexual problems encountered following prostate cancer treatment. This novel and highly collaborative approach empowered patients to use art and new forms of artistic expression as an alternative language to express and communicate their feelings of emotional and physical trauma using visual metaphors that go beyond the clinical and can resonate with a deeper sense of touch and emotional meaning. It focused on the concepts of damage and repair, asking at what stage change became damage and exploring the nature of repair? Work created by the artists, drawing on the contributions from patients, was shared a the workshop by the artists and patients to challenge health professionals by confronting them with a form of communication that is unfamiliar and hard to understand, replicating a sense of the patient’s perspective in dealing with medical issues.