Photo credit: Tyler Deal
Craft and Community Vitality Grants
To create a space that fosters community through visual narrative medicine and bookmaking for two groups this fall. The first group is for survivors of traumatic birthing events. The second group is for birthing individuals experiencing perinatal grief, including miscarriage, termination for medical reasons, stillbirth, and other forms of perinatal loss. This project will fill the gap in coverage of maternal and mental healthcare by providing a craft-based community to individuals with shared experiences marginalized by the US healthcare system.
Tyler Deal, LCMHC, is the owner of Blue Ridge Expressive Arts, an integrated care practice in her hometown of Boone, which fosters the mind/body connection for individuals coping with medical trauma, chronic and terminal illness, traumatic birth, miscarriage, grief, and loss. She revives traditions of communing through craft in a space that allows individuals to process feelings of marginalization within their healthcare experiences through art making. From these experiences participants craft a new narrative within Appalachia.
Tyler's personal artwork is about material foreplay. She has an interest in exploring the dialogue between the delicate and rigid, the malleable and the static. The harmony between processes achieves a quiet tension representative to her experiences as an artist and expressive arts therapist.