Email me at danielle.rosier@talktalk.net with your details and I will send you a card for you to fill in and keep

Please comment with your pledges

We all of us have a seemingly innate tendency to hold onto things that mean something to us. This “holding on to” includes things which have a uniquely personal story about someone who is, or has been, in our lives. Throughout history we have kept things of monetary value to remind us of people – hence bequests in wills of particular objects, with specific personal references.

But we also, in our general daily lives, keep small, or otherwise apparently insignificant, everyday objects and things, which also and equally serve us as a helper in keeping someone else in rememberance.

This collaborative book is about that.

D Rosier

London

2008-2011

Venue: Podium Lecture theatre, London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle.

Thou Art flyer

This event will start with a screening of “Thou Art” – a film of first person narratives telling the story of the lives of artists. These are lives in which both mental illness and art have played a major role. It is a forceful statement about access, about rights, about the link between mental health difficulties and creativity, about resilience and personal fortitude. Dr Olivia Sagan and Jake Stratton (Director of Thou Art the film) will introduce it.  This project is a collaboration between South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and University of the Arts London, funded by Arts Council England and the South London and Maudsley Charitable Trust.

The panel discussion will address a range of issues including:

How can the learning experience in Higher Arts Education be more accessible and inclusive of people with mental health difficulties?

What forms of mobility are available for artists with mental health difficulties who practice in community arts settings, to access the „mainstream‟ arts world?

How can art education ensure that the rich creative contribution of students who have experienced mental health difficulties is recognised, and how can it be tapped into to enrich the culture the University, its  curriculum and its support systems?

If anyone would like to travel to the event together in a group, we will be meeting in the front entrance at the  Maudsley hospital at 12.45 pm, departing at 1.00 pm to catch a bus to the London College of Communication.

For the first part of the workshop we will be getting to know each other as a group, and then generating some autobiographical material, sharing selected excerpts with the group.

Then we will be making small, personal objects from some of that material.

The focus is on being in safe space within which to reflect on parts of who we are and who we would like to be, and making some mementoes to represent and reinforce some of our discoveries about ourselves.

Therapeutic art, what we can also call creative arts occupation, encourages the person to reframe themselves from being seen as a service user to seeing themselves as a creative individual. High value is placed on the artwork. The participant (and the group) is/are their own therapist, working only with material they are comfortable with. The group are not seen as service users, they are seen as creative individuals. The artist facilitators’ role is to structure the time and guide the activity. In this case, they are also active participants in the activity, freely sharing their own “material”. There is no discussion of what lies behind the work. The work is all. Emphasis is placed on peer support and on moving towards participating in other art activities and groups, ultimately moving into mainstream art groups and courses, public exhibitions etc. The focus is on creativity and making.

Autobiographical art focuses on creative self-expression which may enable the participant to view themselves differently through externalisation of thoughts and images. It explores the similarities and differences between who we were, who we are, and who we would like to be. A recent literature review[1] reported “by using creative arts occupations to express feelings and moods, participants were empowered to decide what feelings and emotions they wanted to express.” Resonance between an inner feeling and the representation of it enables participants to recognise themselves and their true feelings. Participants are encouraged (in this case through guided worksheets) to connect with the whole gamut of their thoughts, feelings and emotions, and are given free choice (control) over which they work with. The aim is to produce a feeling of wellbeing, success and a sense of pride in the finished work.

D Rosier

Service User Consultant, SLaM and Artist (BA (Hons), Central Saint Martins)

September 2011

fiona deighton

charlie dillon

teresa graham

oliver honeywill

courtney power

tina reid

d rosier

islington arts factory

private view friday 14th october 6-9pm

2 Parkhurst Road,  Holloway, London, N7 0SF

www.islingtonartsfactory.org

monday – wednesday 10am – 11pm thursday 10am – 10pm friday 10am – 7pm saturday 10am – 5.30pm sunday 11am – 5.30pm

nearest tube caledonian road / holloway road  (piccadilly line)

buses17, 29, 91, 253, 254, 259, 263, 393

We all have a working idea of the self: we know “who we are”, or think we do. We understand that we possess an individual identity, that it matters greatly to us, and that it is one of the means by which we function in society. This personal identity is complex. It is made up of traits that we are born with and views that we acquire as we go through life. Some aspects of our identity are essentially permanent, others are subject to change. Identification for official purposes is often controversial because it does not acknowledge this complexity and variability. Authority’s challenge “Who are you?” is easily satisfied with a signature or a PIN number. The deeper question “Who, really, am I?” remains much harder to answer. While identity is currently a controversial topic, it is always a human story.

From the Wellcome collection
 Identity exhibition booklet (2009)

.

Who am I?

This question – asked so often – suggests that there is actually a plausible answer. Almost as if our being were a fixed thing. People who ask this sort of question are typically struggling with their identity and are searching for a core sense of themselves. The irony is that the more you seek to identify who you are, the more fragile you are likely to feel about yourself. There may be an inverse correlation between the question being asked and the ease with which you experience your life. The emphasis shouldn’t be on discovering who you are (what is buried beneath) but on facilitating the emergence of what you’d like to experience. Our identity should be seen as an ongoing process. Rather than a static snapshot, we should embrace a flowing sense of self, whereby we are perpetually re-framing, re-organizing, re-thinking and re-considering ourselves. How different would life be if rather than asking who am I, we contemplated how we’d like to engage life?

 From Psychology Today (2010)

I recently trialled week one of the two week workshops with a group of “experts”. I am very grateful to Ali, Colin, Garry, Helen, Sarah N, Sarah W and Störm for their participation and on-going feedback as I continue to test and refine all aspects of the workshop’s experience.

I am hoping that these experts will similarly road test week two’s programme later this year. Their work from week two, will, with  their permission, also be posted on this blog.

I hope to run the week one workshop with SLaM (the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) staff who work with service users, later this year (2011). Week one’s shape and content (generating autobiographical material and then making, from that material) means that it can also be run as a stand-alone workshop: and if the feedback from the first staff group is positive, my aim is to have it available to SLaM front-line staff, to contribute to their continuous professional development (CPD).

I also believe that it could make a very effective team building workshop, so I will also seek to run it with SLaM multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs). At a time when the whole organisation (SLaM) is undergoing radical change and reorganisation, I hope this may be an effective way to foster newly organised teams getting to know each other in a more holistic and non-hierarchical way.

Below are the badges made during the week one workshop; those which participants were happy to place in the public domain. I will similarly be posting the badges made in subsequent workshops.

Near the end of next year’s exhibition, there will be an event, funded by SGDP, where all participants (staff, service users and experts) will be invited to wear some or one of their badges.

Some comments from the workshop participants:

“The workshop has been very thought provoking with regards to where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going.”

“I found it a beautifully sensitive and simple framework of thinking, feeling and doing. Encouraging the participant to see the complex in the simple and vice versa.”

“I had the chance to look at different aspects of what I think about myself. I rarely have a chance to do this in a group setting and it was good to share some of this with others.”

Three artists from Visual into Social (ViS), Alexandra Buhagiar,  D Rosier, and Steve Renn, intervened outside Tracey Emin’s Hayward Gallery exhibition, ‘Love is what you want’. Inspired by her work and the title of the exhibition, they asked passers-by what they wanted, and invited them to record this in words or images. People participated enthusiastically and below are the 100+ responses, including one from Tracey Emin.

Thank you to all who took part.

Some images from the day are here