Creative Health projects and research
I have a long standing involvement and interest in the Creative Health sector: After training in performance arts, I ran arts workshops for people with disabilities in community and residential care settings. These ranged from music and sensory sessions, to craft, mural painting and flower arranging. As an associate artist, working in sound story and voice, I’ve worked on many participatory and socially engaged arts projects with a creative health focus, including projects delivered by Verd de gris arts, London Bubble and Dreaming(ing) Field Lab.
In a collaboration with StoryFutures, ISO Design, the local library & community members, I developed an immersive psychogeographical map of my home borough of Lewisham for the 3D internet as part of the nationwide StoryTrails Project (2022). The BBC Lullabies Project (2010) which I instigated and produced has been used as an international resource, and I’ve presented research at Finding A Voice 2019 (GSMD) and at the MARCH Singing and Mental Health Sandpit at Snape Maltings in 2020.
In 2023 - 2025 with support from the Arts Council (DYCP) I reimagined my arts practice and creative process in relation to chronic illness. This allowed me to explore arts and healing through a personal lense and develop new health centred ways of working. I discovered how the arts can support us through health crises and the changes this brings. Having practically and theoretically researched art and healing within the context of my own experience, I'm now looking outward to take the cautious and necessary steps needed to develop a participatory practice working with others with similar chronic illness. I am currently pursuing funding to undertake further research and to run a pilot project of creative health coaching workshops in Lewisham. In the future I will create multimedia art work from this research, and a book of resources, which would support others nationally and internationally.