Event overview
Part of the Centre of the Body programme of events - 'Exploring the Body: Interdisciplinarity in Practice' supported by the Wellcome Trust
Professors Coombes and Jefferies will explore visions of breast cancer ranging from laboratory and clinic to the interior and exterior worlds of illness, and living on. If genomics have transformed the common condition of breast cancer into many separate illnesses so have those affected sought their voices in different languages, as:
English which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. Virgina Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’ in Collected Essays, vol.4, London, Hogath Press, 1967, p.194.
Charles Coombes is Director of The Imperial CRUK Cancer Centre, Chair of The Imperial Cancer Research (UK) Centre Steering Committee and Theme leader for Cancer, Imperial College London. He is carrying out research aimed at understanding the mechanisms of drug resistance and development of novel anti-cancer drugs and also works as an oncologist. He is a painter in oils, acrylics and watercolour.
Janis Jefferies is Professor of Visual Arts and Research, and Artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios. She is an artist, writer and curator, whose work includes:
Lived Lives – an interdisciplinary research project led by Seamus McGinnis, artist and Ad Astra Scholar in Suicide Studies. It examined 100 young (under 35 years) lives lost to suicide between the years 2004-2010. This project emerged from a nationwide interdisciplinary research project on young suicide in Ireland, under the supervision of Prof Kevin M. Malone, University College Dublin (Psychiatry, the Mental Health Research Unit, St.Vincents Hospital) and Prof Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths. It investigated how a creative arts practice, cloth, material objects, sounds and stories, could contribute to a deeper insight and understanding of youth suicide by integrating a range of methodologies from the world of science and the arts. Lived Lives continues to unfold as social probe, questioning the silence of stigma and official inaction around young lives lost to suicide in Ireland and internationally. The project was showcased at Royal College of Physicians Ireland (2008 and 2009) and NACD, Dublin.
www.gold.ac.uk/centreofthebody/
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 May 2013 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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