Recent & Selected Projects

Please note that a number of my projects are highly sensitive taking place across clinical settings. As such I often cannot directly share content that participants create. I am happy to talk in more detail privately about projects. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.

Taking Care of Ourselves

2022-2024

In autumn 2022 I was awarded a bursary from a-n to explore the development of an individualised support framework to help me think about how to sustainably work in this sector, including working with experts to:

• Think about practical ways to manage fees and workloads, including building awareness of the 'weight' of current and upcoming works and emotional capacity to work on such projects;

• Explore how to better implement and ask for support when working on projects that have the potential for exposure to distressing conversations and content;

• Identify and notice via embodied methods when work is causing a significant disruption, and figuring out how to create change or process the residual feelings.

Since then I have been running sessions to support other artists and arts workers, sharing my findings and taking them through a creative and collaborative exploration of what taking care of ourselves might look like. The aim of the workshops have been to support individuals to gently build up the beginnings of their own support framework. Artists have been supported to:

• Explore setting professional and personal boundaries in their work;

• Exploring and defining what they need to do their best work;

• Make work that explores their lived experience of illness;

• Let go of the content they are exposed to at work or in participatory practices.

Workshops have taken place online and in person for Arts & Health Hub, London Arts & Health’s Creative Health City unconference, and Team London Bridge’s Medi-culture Festival.

The Big Anxiety (Naarm / Melbourne, Australia)

2022

Across October 2022 I delivered a programme of work as part of The Big Anxiety Festival, Australia’s biggest arts and mental health festival. This included:

• Delivering a series of photography and mental health workshops at Warburton Arts Centre, focusing on how we can use photography to be more present.

• Delivering a workshop for artists at Burrinja Cultural Centre, focusing on how to develop and devise arts and mental health projects whilst considering our own care.

• Facilitating a long table discussion on suicide.

• Participating in 2 days of Awkward Conversations, an opportunity for members of the public to have one-on-one conversations with myself exploring mental health, through the use of images.

• Participating in a panel discussion at The Capitol Theatre, Brain Storms: Creativity & Mental Health, with: Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe, Honor Eastly and Sally Hepworth.

• Screening my film, to bloom, and then leading a workshop on writing stories of loss. Participants were then invited back the following day to contribute to a collaborative film, Stories of Loss, sharing their own experiences. Watch the film below.

This opportunity was funded by Arts Council England and The Big Anxiety. You can read more about my experience in Naarm/Melbourne my article for Inspire the Mind.

King’s College London — Culture Team

Ongoing

Over the past 4 years I have been involved with working with King’s College London’s Culture team on a number of projects. These range from creative wellbeing sessions for students, to focus groups on student mental health and the designing of a new student curriculum that focuses on arts, health and wellbeing.

Outside of the Box

2022

Since 2018 I have worked with King’s College London teaching on the medical humanities module for second year medical students, as part of their longitudinal GP placements. During this module students are tasked with identifying a particular patient group or health difficulty, then making (in groups) a creative project that reflects on the patient experience. The idea is not to produce health information but to spend time with patients understanding the impact that this health difficulty has on their lives, and to create a reflective piece that shares their learning. The students create sculpture, photographs, poems and much more that highlight their learning through the humanities.

In 2022 I was asked to curate the student work into an exhibition called Outside of the Box which went on display at Science Gallery London throughout June and July.

Research is…

2022

I was commissioned by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust to deliver a creative and collaborative workshop that interrogated our perceptions of what medical research is. Bringing together patients from wards, peer support workers, lived experience researchers and ward staff we explored what our understanding of research is and what it means to us. The exercise brought together fruitful reflections on issues such as accessibility, cultural diversity, [mis]trust of the health system and much more. By engaging in a creative activity participants felt that they could be engaged in discussions on their own terms — drawing, colouring, contributing to our collective work without necessarily speaking.

Seeing Sound

2020-2021

Seeing Sound brings together a partnership between The British Library, the Free Space Project (London) and The Brain Charity (Liverpool) to explore language through natural sounds taken from The British Library’s extensive sound archive. The project was designed for people living with aphasia, an impairment in language following an injury to the brain, most commonly from a stroke in the left hemisphere. I worked across the entire project: from recruiting local participants to supporting the facilitating artist (Cat Andrew) and curating and producing both the online and in person exhibitions.

Show & Tell

2020-2021

Brought to you by The Photography Movement and Cisco, Show and Tell spotlights the all-important topic of mental health in the young, asking the simple but often overlooked question; How are you feeling?

Read more about this project over at National Geographic or Yahoo! UK, or Femail.

Working alongside world leading photographers I supported devising the concept and delivery of this national project that attracted submissions from 22,000 young people. Through a series of online workshops and tasks, young people were invited to create & share their photographs in our virtual exhibition “how are you feeling?” I also took part in a number of live feedback sessions for schools that engaged in the programme. Other photographers involved included Rankin, Francis Augusto and Emma Hardy.

Watch below to see my video for the project, talking about my experience in discovering photography and setting a task for young people. Check out the Show and Tell website for full information on the project and to see the selection of images for the How are you feeling? exhibition.

Freedom to Be

2020

Freedom to Be was a creative project delivered conceived and produced by myself in my role as Artistic Director of Free Space Project. The project took place over the summer of the first COVID lockdown in 2020, supporting patients that were shielding at the James Wigg and Queens Crescent GP practices in north London.

High quality art boxes and weekly activity sheets were hand delivered to patients in Camden, prompting participants to creatively respond to their experiences of the pandemic.

Watch our short film below to find out more about the project. Works made by patients were then exhibited on the ground floor of Kentish Town Health Centre.

Want to know more?

You can read an article I wrote for Historic Royal Palaces reflecting on the project. Or Listen to this short audio visual presentation of me speaking about the project. Commissioned by National Gallery for their event Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity.

Our Future Likes

Bethlem Gallery, 2018

Working with young people under section at Bethlem Hospital’s adolescent inpatient unit. The project focused on using photography to help the young people to tell their story of what their experience of being in hospital was like, especially given the strict rules around telephones and technology. Young people were given digital cameras to document their hospital stay, with images exhibited as a part of Bethlem Gallery’s Our Future Likes show.

I Want to Live

Free Space Project, 2018

A complex project exploring the impact of suicide. In conjunction with my exhibition I Want to Live I ran a series of creative workshops, supported by a psychotherapist, to safely explore suicidality. Each week focused on a different creative activity (photography, layering, words) whilst actively encouraging group sharing and reflection. Workshops took place within Kentish Town Health Centre.