Altaring Consciousness

You've just visited a cancer treatment center and your soul swells with strong emotion--hope, fear, prayerfulness, sorrow, or any combination of the above. You know that the parking lot, and the workaday world beyond it, are poor places to process the raw emotion. What to do?

At the Center for Cancer Treatment and Research of Palmetto Richland Memorial Hospital in Columbia, S.C., an altar stands to serve your needs. Conceived by artist-in-residence Heidi Darr-Hope and placed in a gallery space where cancer-patient artwork is on view, the altar fairly shimmers with blessings and prayers. Passersby are invited to write their thoughts on slips of paper, then tuck them within the altar walls. Several hundred are received every month, says Darr-Hope, most of them expressing a prayer of healing in the name of a cancer patient.

Altars are usually associated with religion rather than with medicine. But for Darr-Hope, age 47, offering a place for prayerfulness where it's needed most makes sense.

"An altar encourages reflection, release, renewal," says the artist, who since 1995 has led art workshops at the hospital. In 1998, when considering activities for a day commemorating cancer survivors, she decided to propose a group altar-making project for patients and other participants. She fitted an antique trunk with shelves, bought bags of silver milagros, and assembled materials to arrange inside, along with paper on which people could inscribe prayers.

"People enjoyed the constructive, positive aspect of making a real, physical object," she remembers. "So much of processing emotion is abstract. This had a nice, concrete quality to it."

Continued on page 2: »