Healthcare – lateral shift

I was pretty pleased with the acrylic on screen experiments and thought maybe my proposal was going to be making a big screen of these tiles that could be placed over top of a screen at times square. I slowly yet quickly came to my senses. At this point I was feeling like I had done some nice experiments but that I didn’t really know where it was all going. Something Marina said in class triggered an earlier direction that I had shrugged off. She said something about a shaman when someone was inquiring about how to make a lateral shift, which is a direction I almost took early on, and was drawn too because of this poem by Gary Snyder. It doesn’t have much to do with healthcare, but medicine man, medicine woman, was an avenue I could start pursuing.

I was trying to find some sort of image that I could use for the final proposal to work with that would tie everything together. I found this symbol for medicine man, but could not figure out something I wanted to make with it:

At some point something clicked and I shifted from medicine man to medicine wheel. This opened up a flood gate of interest for me. The medicine wheel is a native american symbol/stone sculpture. It’s hard to define what it means exactly, since every tribe prescribed slightly different meanings to it. Generally it was a symbol for healing, for growing, for finding one’s place in the universe. The stone sculptures themselves actually point to various astronomical points.

The medicine wheel also falls into Jung’s archetype of a circle, or self. He postulated that the circle symbolizes wholeness of self. The circle can be found symbolically in many cultures:

Jung had his own symbol for it. The dot in the center symbolizes the ego, our known world, what we are aware of. The outer circle represents everything else in our being, the totality of everything we are, though not aware of. Look familiar?