Healing Environments

The Cedars: Photography Residency

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Haldon Art Project

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Printmaking with Emma Molony

Feltmaking with Hermonie Skrine

Painting

Coast & Dune Art Project

The Coast & Dune Arts Project was designed to enable service users and staff create art work which would make the waiting areas and corridors more welcoming, comfortable and interesting for all who visit and work there.

Workshops were held over several days in 2008 at Coast and Dune, and at the Long Fox units for adult inpatient and older adults services in Weston-super-Mare. Over forty service users and staff took part, with some people coming to several workshops.

Windmill House Art Project

Woodspring Community Mental Health Team, relocated in January 2007 to newly built premises at Kenn Road, Cleveden, North Somerset.

The Windmill House Arts Project was designed to enable service users and staff create art work which would make the waiting areas and corridors more welcoming, comfortable and interesting for all who visit and work there.

Workshops were held on five days in May and August 2007. Over thirty service users and staff took part, with some people coming to several workshops. Everyone worked cooperatively with paint, oil pastels, chalks and collage to produce the many individual pieces needed for abstract 'patchworks' and groups of themed pictures.

The project was documented photographically and many participants gave permission for their hands to be photographed as they worked. These images have also been displayed.

Anyone with a spare half hour in the waiting room maybe able to match up some of the photographs of artists at work on paintings and drawings with the actual piece they were working on when it was finished.

The project was initiated by Ben Anthony, Art Psychotherapist at Windmill House and facilitated by Karen Huckvale, Artist and Art Psychotherapist of Insider Art Ltd, Exeter, Devon.

The project was made possible by funding from NHS Avon and Wiltshire Partnership Charitable Funds Committee and The Self Heal Association, a registered charity.

The project was installed in December 2007.

Waiting Room Walks: Healing Environments

Malcolm Learmonth, in his capacity as Lead Art Psychotherapist, for Devon Partnership NHS Trust’s Creative Therapies Team, has recently been taking part as team member and project lead on a Kings Fund Sponsored ‘Enhancing the Healing Environment’ programme. )

The EHE team worked with artists, designers, the estates department and all who use the building at The Briars, the base for the Creative Therapies Team, to make this centre as arts based in ambience and atmosphere as it is in its therapy practice.

As an Insider Artist, Malcolm’s art work for the project was developing and implementing ‘Waiting Room Walks’

Waiting rooms are often not relaxed or comfortable spaces. By mounting a digital photo screen in the room, and putting together a ‘library’ of imagery taken on local walks, the project aims to provide both a ‘place to go ‘ in imagination, but also an incentive to do one of the best things you can do for your mental and physical health: go for a walk!

A catalogue of walks is provided, with details of how to get to the starting point, public transport and how accessible or easy the walk is. There is also a wall mounted map showing the walk’s locations.

All of the walks were photographed in one ‘sitting’ (or ‘walking’), and there are around one thousand images altogether in the library!

Below are images of some other aspects of the EHE project, and more on the Waiting Room walks idea. Malcolm is keen to develop the idea with other waiting areas and is working on this.

Digital Screen on site: