By Hannah Hull, January 2011

This report contains ten key themes drawn from the ART vs REHAB Seminar held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration on 25 October 2010, The seminar is part of ongoing collaborative research to explore and provoke new relationships between art and mental health, led by myself, Hannah Hull, and supported by LCACE and Goldsmiths, University of London. This research has and continues to consist of outreach projects, seminars, focus groups and writings.

The following themes are outlined in the report, and can be seen as starting points for further discussion within this ongoing research:

• The Romanticisation of Mental Health

• The “Other”: Everyone has Mental Health

• The Role of Art Institutions in Mental Health

• Artists vs Art Therapists

• 1:1 vs Group Situations

• Outcomes vs Epiphanies

• Art vs Marketing in Mental Health

• Culture of optimism: are you too close to critique your own practice?

• The role of arts practitioners’ own art practice

• Can the Art and the Relationship be separated - which one rehabilitates?

Pt 3: Creativity & Mental Illness - There have been plenty of artists who exhibited signs of mental illness over the years. Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin. But despite the archetype of the mad artist, the connection between creativity and mental health is very much up for debate.

Word cloud created from Hannah Hull’s presentation at ART vs REHAB, 25 October 2010, via Worlde.net

Word cloud of the group discussion at the ART vs REHAB seminar, 25 October 2010, via Wordle.net

I am a practicing artist who has worked in community arts for a number of years. I have always separated my own art practice from the workshops that I facilitated. However, an increasing number of artists see their work with the community as their own practice. This got me thinking about how this can work, what kind of art it produces and what the roles and benefits are for both the artist and the participants.

Last year I undertook a residency in a day centre for people with severe and profound learning difficulties, where I felt a cross over between my practice and the work I did with them begin to occur. Around the same time I began an MA in Fine Art. I presented this work to my tutors who questioned whether it was art and raised issues over authorship. Wanting to gain a greater understanding of this I wrote my thesis on participatory art.

This post would be ridiculously long if I included all my thoughts, observations and conclusions on the matter, but one of the things that really stood out for me from my research was something artist, Sarah Cole, calls ‘learning in public’ referring in part to a two way learning process between the artist and the people they are working with and also to being seen to make mistakes, to be uncertain and not to know. She worked a lot in schools where she felt that being seen to fail wasn’t usually accepted and saw that working in this way challenged this and create a more interesting learning experience.

Jayne Lloyd

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. Graham Greene

Watch a man at play for an hour and you can learn more about him than in talking to him for a year.

plato- i think.

post by thickandtastyxxx

“Kayla Kavanagh is a solo artist with a difference. The Yorkshire-based Singer/Songwriter plays nine instruments, writes and performs her own original music and has toured the UK with her ‘one-woman band’ show from the side of a VW Campervan – all while living with the daily struggle of a mental health condition.

“Hidden behind the music lies Kayla’s life with a mental health condition called Borderline Personality Disorder - a serious mental illness that affects around 2-3% of the population, characterised by a chronic instability in self-image, emotions and relationships.

“Kayla has become an ambassador for awareness of illnesses such as BPD, and was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about how music has provided a positive outlet for the often overwhelming emotions associated with living with a mental health condition.”

Writer Paddy Gormley, who runs a weekly drop-in philosophy class for homeless people, will be chairing the event…

www.wordsinaction.info

Paddy is a writer, teacher, facilitator and presenter, who specialises in creative thinking processes.  He teaches a weekly drop-in philosophy class for the Crisis charity, enabling homeless and otherwise marginalised people to recover lost self esteem, develop powerful creative thinking techniques and gain confidence and friendship by way of the endangered species that is intelligent conversation.  In this term’s course, entitled Do Machines Listen?, participants are examining the issue of whether our humanity is being compromised by the increasingly pervasive role of computerised technologies.   

Alison Trower is a performer, director, writer and artist. She has worked with adults and the elderly, using creative process to overcome blocks. She proposes the following idea surrounding the relationship between creativity and discomfort:

“Personal discomfort plays a vital role in one’s artistic development and one’s personal shift. Rather than reveal something ‘amiss’, discomfort can be welcomed to signpost where useful work may take place. In society at large, discomfort hails a reaction of alarm and aversion. Blanket suspicion of discomfort is reiterated in our daily speech patterns. There are times, however, when collective sentiment is unhelpful and when decoupling the tag, ‘wrong’, from pain and from behaviour may be crucial for movement and growth.”

I am a theatre maker and have just completed my first piece as a solo artist - You’re Not Like The Other Girls Chrissy - which had a successful run at the Edinburgh festival.

I am now starting work on my second piece and I am fascinated (and to a degree stumped) by the question of how directly a performer can tackle the issue/the true story of mental illness which is what I want to do with this piece.  I am currently experimenting with the idea of a double story - a girl who is sick but who also lives or dreams her way through a fairy tale where her fairytale-self is given/gives herself an impossible task.  The denouement would be a rejection both of the quest and the fairytale ending and the hope of a recovery.  The staging idea I am currently exploring is one girl telling this story using projection and creating landscapes/settings with a giant duvet.

I would be fascinated to discuss these ideas and specifically the challenges of creating work involving stories about mental illness.

I also want to work with medical experts and academics as the piece is devised - I’m still looking for those people - and see how this partnership could enrich the devising process.

Caroline Horton