Women Artists/Women Healing is produced by Elizabeth Bruce, author of ‘And Silence Left the Place,’ stage actor, playwright of ‘Sheila’s Iron,’ and art teacher, with assistance from Associate Producers Alivia C. Tagliaferri, of Ironcutter Media, LLC and Timotha Howard, photographer and Director of CentroNia’s Community Schools Program.
Elizabeth Bruce, Producer
As an artist, an educator, a grassroots member for the past 40 years of a progressive global community working toward an agenda of peace and social justice, I have been deeply moved by chronicles of suffering and renewal, trauma and survival, war and atonement, and especially by the capacity of the creative process to comfort and heal the body, the mind, the wounded spirit.
As a woman, a feminist, a mother, a daughter, a wife, and now a near elder, I am ever humbled by the healing processes that emerge slowly through the weaving of deeply personal narratives, the connective tissue among those burdened by traumatic experiences and those called to bear witness. Indeed, the landscape of such trauma is vast: the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of the soldier, of the survivor of child abuse, of rape, of battering, of devastation by catastrophe, mental illness, displacement, of the many dimensions of extreme anguish.
Even my own my family’s narrative, so touched by good fortune though it is, has been shaped—like so many countless others—by loss in war and at home—the uncle who survived the Bataan Death March to spend five years in a Japanese POW camp, the grandfather half-blinded in the Great War, the 18-year old relative killed in the Battle of the Bulge on his first day in combat, the best friend brutally murdered, the torments of mental illness and infirmity on family members and loved ones, a cascade of like circumstances endured daily by vast portions of humanity.
Such narratives compel the artist to dig deeper, within oneself, one’s family, community, within the political and social constructions of our world, to bear witness, to record, to honor the truth of these narratives and to act in the service of healing. The proposed project seeks to gather women artists: soldiers, writers, survivors, healers together to give voice to the burden of trauma and the triumph of healing.
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