My creative practice spans individual work as an artist, curator, writer, and researcher and includes collaborative projects and creative project management. My background in museums, psychotherapy, women’s health, and community engagement. I am founder/co-director of Common Threads creative arts and health organisation, which works in partnership with museum. I am currently artist in residence at the Beeches Perinatal Unit, Derby Royal Hospital.

I am interested in the construction of individual and cultural identities, their constantly recalibration and mediation through objects.

PhD Title: Pathways to Wellbeing: exploring the social and spatial role of museums in supporting mental health.

Introduction

Located within the AHRC-funded M4C, the PhD is a partnership between the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and the Holburne Museum.  Its focus is the Pathways to Wellbeing programme which supports mental health through a range of creative participatory activities at the Holburne and other partner museums in Bath.

The widely used ‘CHIME’ model specifies ‘identity’ as a key component in recovery from mental health problems. I will explore the role of museums in contributing to constructions of individual and cultural identities, interrogating the links between identity and memory, and the pervasive idea of museums as ‘collective memory’.  I am interested in pursuing the idea of the gaps in collective memory perpetuated by museums, and how this might impact on mental health. 

Research questions

I will explore the project through three key research questions:

1. What role does museum participation have to play in contributing to improved mental health?
   
   Exploring museum participation, who defines it, what motivates it, and to what ends; specifically, at the Holburne and how the Pathways programme impacts on the mental health of participants.
   
    What contributions can the spatial or geographic qualities of museums make to improved mental health and wellbeing?
2. 
   Exploring creative wellbeing programmes located in museums and compared with other current mental health interventions; exploring the impact of physical spaces and locations of the Pathways programme on the mental health of participants; and the potential mental health impact of  exhibition and display of work by programme participants in museums.
   
   
3. What can the concept of the ‘not-therapy’ therapeutic experience bring to our understanding of museum-led mental wellbeing’

Exploring creative wellbeing programme practices in museums compared with current mental health interventions such as Art Therapy or ‘talking therapies’, and the impact of this on participants, delivers and museum staff.

Pathways to wellbeing

Pathways to Wellbeing: Changing  Lives through art (Phase 1, 2016-19) is a museum-based community participation  programme supporting people living with mental health issues, social isolation and homelessness through engagement with local heritage and creativity. The 3-year project was originally supported by Arts Council England and is now funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.  The programme is made up of four key projects, all of which are free to participants. https://www.holburne.org/learning/community-engagement/pathways-to-wellbeing/