As an artist, are you interested in joining a growing societal movement to explore the end of life? To broach the topic through art? To deepen your understanding, and guide your audience toward an overlook? To humanize the inhumane experience our societies have made of the end of life in the 21st century?
I’ve authored a unique, well-respected end-of-life lexicon. Although I didn’t plan on doing this, when my time in the EOL crucible came I found myself vowing to get to the bottom of our failures—my own, my family’s, medicine’s—and, when I got there, to bring the answers that I found to life.
Along the way I developed a fresh way of looking at our dying experiences, the situations we find ourselves in, here in our 21st century dying milieu. Among the things I realized is that the word “dying” fails to map our dying territory; that our dying situations go far beyond the oversimplified binary—the intensive care unit or at home. With some reflection and effort I identified 17 distinctly different dying situations common to all in developed societies. It’s a lot to explain, and I’ll not attempt a short-form here; it’s fully presented in my book The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying. An early explanation occupies roughly the middle third of my 2013 TEDxFoCo Talk, Dying IN Peace to Die AT Peace: New Terms of Engagement, viewable on this site’s Speaking page or on YouTube. A 2019 journal article, Understanding Demises as Destinations Across Our Dying Territory, in the Certified Senior Advisors Journal, provides a summary without showing any of the figures that accompany the book and live presentations. This part of my lexicon is known as Windrum’s Matrix of Dying Terms (or by its user-friendly name, Our Dying Territory).
Now I’m seeking artists who are seeking their own end-of-life muse, who want to deeply reflect upon modern end-of-life realities through their work. You’ll have the potential to reflect upon 17-19 end-of-life situations as a series of works. I can offer the work itself, to function as a muse. Together we can explore bringing what you create and what I’ve created to the public in a shared exhibition or performance.
Interested? Contact me and let’s take a next step.
Clarifiers:
– This outreach is about bringing our unique works together collaboratively in the public sphere; your work remains yours and my work remains mine;
– I am *not* proposing to hire you! I am proposing that my unique EOL work has the potential to serve as a muse for yours; and…
– It will take some engagement on your part to understand my EOL lexicon, to discover if you find it stimulating. I can honestly say that what I’ve created occupies a unique, crucial, and under-focused-on aspect of the EOL scene. In addition to the resources linked above, I can provide, at no cost, an eBook or a PDF file of The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying.
~Bart Windrum