The Art of Healing and the Healing of Art

We admire the ability to heal, and rightly so. It takes great skill to fix and repair the human body. To stitch torn skin or muscle back together, to rid the body of disease and infection, to restore wellness, opportunity and life, if we can. Medicine is in many ways an art, an art of healing. Healing that not only requires analytic skills and knowledge, but creativity and empathy. The healer is an artist.

This art is practised alongside ever-growing biotechnology and diagnostic tools. Machines that enable us to see further than the bruised flesh, to analyse marrow and beyond. Tools that help us to see ourselves at the deepest physical layer. Technology also helps us to create medicines and vaccines, ways of eradicating nasty microbes that can hold the world to ransom.

Art and medicine are similar. Both help us to see ourselves at a deeper level. To understand our vulnerabilities, our existence and our fears. Think about the surgeon adept with their blade. Their ability to open the human body and reveal the culprit of the pain, like Sherlock Holmes. To excise illness from the human body. To dig deep. Although we revere the surgeon, we also fear a rendezvous with their knife.

Let us consider a question then, what makes us healthy?

Is it the surgeon, the dose of medicine, is it the hospital and its technology?

Is it your connection with others? A walk through nature? A story that makes you think about the nature of existence?

The idea of Salutogenic well-being asks us to think about what makes us well, what promotes our health. It asks us to think about what keeps us alive, not merely what makes us ill. Gone is the focus on wretchedness, we now recognise not just the biological dimensions of health but the psychological and social dimensions too. Prevention and promotion. Connection. Security and rights. Justice. Things that can help us, to an extent, avoid the surgeon’s blade.

And Art.

Art can be medicine. Jackson Pollock’s number 5 in a vial. A cure for social isolation, a means of connection to history, culture and other people. An opportunity for mindfulness. A chance to create and appreciate. A means of connecting with characters and stories and complexity, to build empathy through moral imagination. Art can be a means of promoting health, whether it is through art therapy or art appreciation.  

As a part of the biopsychosocial model of health, art can play an important conceptual role. The healer is an artist, and the artist is a healer.

Dr Connal Lee

Night and Day: A creative meeting of minds

An unsent fan letter, the discovery of a 30-year-old magazine in a dusty archive of craft journals in Mount Isa, and a final creative meeting of minds lie behind the exhibition of celebrated ceramicist Petrus Spronk at The Main Gallery in Halifax Street. Please click here for the full version of the interview from the INDAILY website.

Türk Basınında Galerimiz Hakkında Haberler / The Main Gallery in Turkish Media.

Introducing The Main Gallery: An arts space connecting communities between Adelaide and Izmir

“I am still in contact with my Turkish friends – the galleries and artists – and am thinking we can send the artists’ pieces over there and they can send their pieces here as an exchange,” Ozlem Yeni tells CityMag. Please click here for the full version of the interview from the CityMag website.

A New Beginning: The Main Gallery

“I was dreaming of these days. In here, I am so happy. Making art, thinking art, talking art. My life is art now.” 
- Ozlem Yeni.

Adelaide-based artist Ozlem Yeni is fulfilling a lifelong dream, and a first for art in Australia.

“Through my research I found out I am the first Turkish artist who is crazy enough to open an art gallery in Australia,” Ozlem laughs.

As an artist, Ozlem depicts the human experience with compassion and grace. Always there is humanity, and humility. Human figures appear in many of Ozlem’s own artworks – abstract forms with no age, race, gender, nor religion. “I call them my people,” she says.

“I believe everybody has an individual story which is written spontaneously. Sometimes we can be a hero, a protagonist, then just a witness. Every story is something unique and precious to think over.”

Now a passion for people’s stories has manifested in a lifelong dream – to open an international art gallery.

Many creations over 20 years have allowed this dream to manifest – many late nights painting, solo and group exhibitions, traveling, sculpting, teaching, dreaming.

I first met Ozlem at a pottery class in Mount Isa, north west Queensland, one of Australia’s largest mining towns. We were both new to town, and found a friend in Isa local of 45 years, French-born clay artist, Michele Savoye.

As a Kiwi “fresh off the boat” from Auckland City, I got a culture shock in my first week, attending the biggest rodeo in the southern hemisphere, withstanding 40 degree heat, learning new slang, and dodging kangaroos at night. Not a town known for its art scene, I was amazed at Ozlem’s drive to create magic in this desert.

Throwing herself into clay work, she started bringing her people into a new dimension. It was inspiring to witness.  Her home studio was a thing of beauty, curated treasures and raw materials beautifully arranged, I wanted to sit in the space for hours.

It wasn’t long before Ozlem opened a public studio with exhibition space, and room for drawing classes. Always looking to challenge herself, Ozlem has used her 20 years in arts and academia to create something truly special in the heart of Adelaide.

“I believe in these challenging times, it is important to share and nurture the idea of hope as well as providing the physical means through which local, national and international artists can exhibit their work.’’

And as always with this big-hearted artist, it’s about people – allowing others to share the space she has created, and peopled with her own unique figures – fashioned in clay and on canvas.