Art Cares?

Abstract

What role can creative practices play in wellbeing? How can museums become spaces of care for those who have experienced trauma? Drawing on creative workshops at Mansfield Museum in the UK this paper will explore the benefits for vulnerable women, and builds on interdisciplinary research in museum studies, wellbeing, care, including Foucault’s concept of self-care, ​(Foucault and Rabinow 1991).​ Mansfield Museum is a community centre with a collection. A porous space, it is embedded in and caringly serves, its varied communities, offering multiple doorways to engagement. A three-minute film documenting the project in the women’s voices will preface a discussion of the role of social justice in the museum within a framework of positive psychology.

I suggest that participation in such workshops can contribute to the wellbeing hexagon proposed by Lee,​(Lee 2021),​comprising: positive and negative emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. The paper examines the phenomenon of active absorption in a physical task described as ‘flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ​(Csikszentmihalyi 2014)​ combined in a safe space for conversation with others of shared lived-experience of trauma. The lack of separation of minds and bodies in creative activity and peer connections appears to dispel intrusive thoughts and promote positive feelings.

I am exploring the impacts of creative workshops on individual participants from a micro-perspective using a mixed methodology which includes surveys, peer-to-peer conversations, semi-structured interviews, observation, and image documentation to triangulate the data. I carry out this research by delivering creative workshops to women self-referred from domestic and sexual abuse services alongside art practitioners and an art therapist. I am interested in the power of women to use their voices collaboratively to support each other through the medium of a shared creative experience. The ‘active self-transformation’ described by Audre Lord (hooks 2014), resonates with my experience at Mansfield Museum and I will make the argument for working with this community in the museum space.

Bio

Tamsin Greaves (she/her) holds a role at Mansfield Museum where she runs the Art Power project funded by the Esmée Fairburn Foundation. Following a career as secondary art teacher in state schools, she completed an MA Museum and Heritage Development at Nottingham Trent University in 2021, winning the outstanding contribution award. Her final research project titled, ‘The Real Thing’ compared pupils’ experience of art online to in-person visits. She published an article in the Journal of Education in Museums 42 and a short submission in the Museological Review 26. Her current research explores the contribution to wellbeing of collaborative creative activities for vulnerable women in a museum context.