Over the past year we have seen people come and go from our North Ayrshire mental health arts festival team, each one bringing something unique to the table and making our last 2 years a great success. This year we felt we needed to expand our small but fantastic team to bring in new ideas and challenge our boundaries across different parts of our community.
In previous years we have sought creative input from our community around a theme and together this has formed the main body of our festivals to date and allowed us to celebrate these at our launch events.
This year we plan to do something different, using a Socially Engaged Practice Approach. For those of you like me that are maybe new to this method, it describes the process of making art out of the people creating it! To do this, we plan to introduce an additional 6 different art form projects across all 6 of our localities in North Ayrshire, each supported by a local artist and coordinated by our festival team. This will further contribute to the wider community events that happen over this period and make up our overall programme.
We hope to capture the creative process this year through film, coordinated and supported by one of this year’s new members from Ayrshire Film Company. The creation of a festival film will allow us to capture peoples artistic journey and explore the wider impact creative arts has on mental health and wellbeing.
In addition to this, we would also like to explore other media outlets to promote the power the arts can have in relation to mental health. We hope to use podcasts throughout this year’s festival planning and development, again providing important spaces for people to share their views and discuss the impact this work can have within individual communities. Watch this space!
In our next post we want to introduce you to our new festival team for this year, so you can learn a bit more about the people that make it all happen. We are excited this year to have new members join us from the Alcohol & Drug Partnership (ADP) and our Learning and Disability and Mental Health services. We are also delighted to welcome our own Festival Artist this year who will be supporting our projects, and a work experience student and post graduate student from the University of the West of Scotland.
Exciting times ahead for all of us, but to help us on our journey we are running two Mental Health & Wellbeing Creative Connect events to meet with individuals and groups who are interested in being part of this year’s programme, or feature as one of our 6 core art forms.
These will take place on:
- Wednesday 14th May from 12:30 – 14:30 at the Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine
- Thursday 15th May from 18:00 – 19:00 via Zoom
To book a place on one of these events go to https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/harbour-arts-centre
North Ayrshire Mental Health Arts Festival 