UAB's Comprehensive Cancer Center has a lot of ways to help cancer patients not just get healthy, but feel healthy. One way involves a little bit of paint, a little bit of clay, and a lot of freedom.
Thursday night, the center unveiled a work of art on display at the Wallace Tumor Institute that took the shape of a cell, and was filled with works cancer patients created through art therapy.
Ashkari Johnson Hodari was one of the people who participated in the 10-week art therapy program. When she started out, she was painting, but eventually she wanted to do something more three-dimensional. She also wanted an African aesthetic to her work. She made two masks, both mounted on canvases, for the display.
But more than art, she got relief out of the program, she said. She was diagnosed with lymphoma about a year ago, and the class was one of the times when she wasn't thinking about the cancer.
"We never really talked about cancer during the class," she said. "It was the first time I felt peace in months. It was the first time I felt really free in months."
Hodari said she thinks art therapy, in whatever form, is useful for more than just cancer patients.
"I encourage other people who are struggling with chronic illness, not just cancer, to explore alternative forms of therapy," she said. "You really need a holistic approach."
Artist Christoffer Frank and his wife, Lori, created the display that holds the patients' art. It's wooden, irregular, and made to look like a cell. The nucleus of the cell consists of structures the Franks made with recycled materials, including the wires from an electric motor, candy wrappers and even some fabric from Lori's wedding dress.
"My greatest hope is that this is a temporary exhibit and that someday we have a cure for cancer," Christoffer Frank said, "that people won't know what this is."
Mary Romano is a five-year survivor of breast cancer. She said it wasn't just the couple hours a week in the art class that helped her. It was that she had something else, something positive to think about.
"It got my mind whirling through the week about what I wanted to do in the next class," she said.
Romano's work on display came from her imagining what the inside of her body was like. There are 17 teal dots on the canvas, representing her 17 lymph nodes that were removed. Three of those dots are different, she calls them "dirty," and they represent the three that tested positive.
But behind all of the other elements in the work are four faint letters, spelling out HOPE.
"I had hope in the beginning," Romano said, "and I have hope now."