Joy Cotton | Can We Talk About Accessibility
”Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This year I took a deeper look into mental and medical health accessibility in Nebraska. I used this as an opportunity to conduct interviews with individuals to create an open conversation. All participants remain anonymous with the permission of a quote used from each conversation. The focus was not only just about mental and medical health perspectives but also an overall thought on accessibility.
I started each interview with open-ended questions. I wanted to keep our conversations broad so participants had the opportunity to speak about other things they wanted to express. These interviews highlighted the frustrations that are met when searching for mental and medical health accessibility.
Not one conversation was the same. Everyone came with different opinions and emotions. I wanted to hear people’s feelings and visualize that in a charcoal drawing. An illustration follows each quote, the drawings sometimes took inspiration from our conversations, and other times what I saw when I heard people’s words, thoughts, and stories.
The world still finds a way to keep moving.
How do you ask questions if you are afraid of the answer?
It was a true discovery when listening to the conversations post-interview. I took a moment to focus on what I saw between the words exchanged. The stories were traded in exchange for open thoughts and discussion. The audio that played not only focused on our conversations but everything around us.
There were layers in each conversation:
Our voices.
Glasses Clinking.
Music playing.
And other conversations surrounding us.
All of those elements came hurtling back to our subject. Where medical professionals are on one end and patients on the other.
There is one nurse,
One doctor,
One psychiatric specialist per 100,000 residents in a single district.
Medical staff are burning out, and at the same time, patients are searching for answers in a realm where the studies are still a practice. On the other end, there are generations of fear and stigma of mental and medical health accessibility due to decades of unethical practices.
Accessing medical and mental health still presents barriers to whether or not it is affordable or if insurance will provide enough coverage. I wanted to talk to people from all perspectives and standpoints to at least begin a conversation about these problems that have been faced not only in Nebraska but America. This problem of affordability is as real as the public mistrust in the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to create an open and comfortable environment for conversation. It seemed like a good starting point, to know it is possible to create an open space for another to voice themselves in and be heard. Creating a space of understanding.
Joy Cotton is a mixed media artist living in Omaha. Joy uses a combination of pencil, acrylic, oil to create paintings and murals. She creates pieces that hold a great significance to personal emotions, like happiness, sadness, anger, and depression. The characters she makes depict different forms of fantasy and realistic figure drawings. These works contain multiple layers of textures and different types of painting applications. A graduate of University of Nebraska at Omaha Joy often works with other artists and organizations within the Omaha arts community. For the past two years she has worked on projects with Omaha Summer Arts Festival (OSAF), Benson First Fridays (BFF), and Midtown Crossing Sunny Chair project. Interacting, building relationships and collaborating with innovative individuals has shown her the interconnectedness of the art community. Through these interactions, observations, and personal projects she has continued to define and develop her artistry.