Since time immemorial humans have sought and invented innumerable ways to heal and make sense of our ailments.
‘Cut and Paste the Body’ began as a way to self-soothe — a response to the intensity of medical training. On paper torn from the back of childhood drawing pads, I worked on the floor, with scissors and glue, to recycle obsolete textbooks into something new.
As such, this project is first a meditative practice and creative outlet for myself. Physician heal thyself, and all.
It is an opportunity to remember the narratives I have received, reflect on the human experience, and integrate them into visual poetry that can be interpreted as the viewer chooses. It is also an appeal for a greater integration of the healing arts back into medicine. It is an acknowledgement of the innate and ancient wisdom in each and every one of us. It is a call to restore harmony within ourselves, with each-other, and with our planet.
In composing my visions, I hope to recall what brought me here. The belief in the wholeness of ourselves and that health is not produced but made present. That medicine is an art as much as a science. And that it belongs to nature.
ARTIST STATEMENT
BIO
Kristin Anchors (American, b. 1987) is a visual artist and emergency medicine doctor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her current studio practice includes dissecting the textbooks she accumulated in training to develop hand cut collages which aim to heal the fractured relationship between body and mind, human and the more-than-human world.
Her mature sense of wonder manifests in every piece, which are both playful and meaningful. With keen attention to detail she seamlessly weaves found imagery to tell stories informed by her unique and uninhibited access to life and death.
Anchors has had a life-long creative practice without formal training in Art. She studied Life Sciences and Philosophy at Arizona State University prior to completing medical school at the University of Arizona. She received specialty training in Emergency Medicine at the University of New Mexico Hospital.
Her work has been featured in galleries and institutions including the Mayo Clinic Center for Humanities in Medicine in Arizona and the Harwood Center for the Arts in Albuquerque; it has been widely published in journals such as For the Wild.