In June this year our Room for Art groups were invited to take part in the Healing Arts Scotland Art Relay run by ITAC – The International Teaching Artist Collaborative. In our strand of the relay we had to think about the stimulus ‘Creativity in Confinement’ and an artwork called ‘Those who hide well live well’ by the artist Andrew Cranston. For our part in the Art Relay we received an artwork from an organisation called CAPS Independent Advocacy, a charity in Edinburgh who support people to have a voice, make their own decisions and to live independently. They produced a long collaborative scroll art work called ‘Speaker Phone’ which used text to express ideas around mental health, speaking out and finding your voice.
Our groups met in the Art Space at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. We were thinking about creative expression and how it helps our mental health. We also looked at the Andrew Cranston’s artwork and learned that he /finds happiness in engagement with nature and that during the pandemic he had painted the trees he saw from the window of his tenement in Glasgow and that this had given him a renewed sense of mental wellbeing during a time of isolation.
We had been donated a lot of self-adhesive vinyl, so our group got to work making large collages using this material and thinking about how we could express ideas around our strategies for maintaining good mental health, thinking about what makes us feel happy and how we have come to realise the healing power of creativity through art making.
Our group really enjoyed coming together to discuss these themes and spending the morning in the beautiful and inspiring Art Room at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Our group have produced a series of black and white graphic collages which express our individual ideas about the things we do to maintain positive mental health, what it means to develop a visual language and find your creative voice and ultimately how creative expression can help us to feel well and fulfilled.
We have compiled the series of black and white collages produced on this project into a large concertina book. The book is free standing and provides a way of exhibiting the artworks together as a collective. We are all looking forward to being part of the Healing Arts Week in August 2024.
Here is a link to the festival website https://www.healingartsscotland.org/
17 July 2024 by
Ursula Bevan Hunter