My practice currently focuses on Arts Participation, engaging with people to creatively explore various subjects and discussions. Through personal testimonies, observations, and shared viewpoints, I create video and sound installations that reflect these narratives. My work explores health topics and themes, as well as more traditional practice within the area of arts & health.
I aim to evolve my practice into more than just documenting stories. I want to encourage participants to actively engage in the artistic process—making art, video, or sound pieces as a form of narrative. This approach not only serves as documentation but also fosters creative exploration, raising awareness and understanding of diverse perspectives.
The opportunity to spend time reflecting on my arts and health practice and explore ways to progress it further was one that was very welcome at an essential point in my career. To start this evaluation, I decided to go back to scratch and research the fundamental questions:
1. What is Arts and Health?
2. What is my practice and how does it fit into arts and health?
Through research and conversations with artists, healthcare professionals, healthcare users and others working within relative fields, I identified areas that I needed to focus on. To be honest, I think that you could go on for eternity finding questions and topics that are worth exploring and on this note I have realised that at some point I need to stop reading, researching, deliberating and talking about it and start to create! So, in the attempt to try and condense the expanse of my thinking, I have taken some of these topics and created an interactive landing page. Selecting any of the topics on this page will take you to a dedicate page of research, conversation or thoughts on that particular matter. The topics will be updated with fresh insights as I progress my work and learning.
Throughout this process I found the diverse conversations fascinating and incredibly useful, all bringing something new and insightful. They made me look at my practice from different angles, often bringing an understanding and excitement about my practice and occasionally making me realise what my practice wasn’t rather than what it was. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who spent time talking to me and sharing their own insights, experiences and incredible work.
As a result of my research and exchanges, I developed a basic process/methodology/format with which I now want to approach projects, including the research and development stages, the questions, aims and potential participants, through to reflection, delivery and dissemination. This way I will not only have an approach to follow with future work but could also use this format to look at my own practice within arts and health.
In conclusion, I understand that my practice has two strands. The first strand involves large projects that focus on specific topics, asking detailed questions that require research, expert advice, and could evolve into significant collaborative art pieces or events. The second strand is more general, adaptable, and can be used in different settings. It prompts simple questions that lead to rich conversations. This strand is one that I hope to apply to working with older people. It is interesting to look and reflect on my work from these two different strands, in the knowledge that what may start as one strand, could develop into another, and one could be part of another, but these are starting points. I am currently working on developing two different projects, one starting off in each of those strands.
This opportunity has enabled me to rekindle areas of interest that I have found myself shying away from due to fears of getting it wrong or imposter syndrome, lack of confidence or having been stung. It has opened doors to conversations that I have been inspired by and made me take a deep dive into my practice in a way I have only half-heartedly done before. It has also made me question many aspects of my approach to my work and how I find participants or communities. As much as I have enjoyed this process I now need to go out and create. I also realise that this documentation and research and development is a continuing project in itself and I will continue to record my experiences as I put all this learning into practice and work towards my two projects and beyond.
