Arts for Wellbeing Zine

Colouring for Wellbeing

Art Journals

Funded by Norfolk Community Foundation

Love Norfolk Fund.

Date

November 01, 2017

Category
Art, Craft, Health and Wellbeing, mental health
Tags
art, collage, community, journals, wellbeing
About This Project

We began this year-long art and wellbeing project for women with mental health issues project in November 2017, supported by Norfolk Community Foundation’s Love Norfolk fund. We ran these three-hour, weekly sessions, alongside one of our wonderful volunteers. Activities included creative journal making, drawing, painting, printmaking, and textiles based on the NEF (the New Economics Foundation)*, Five Ways to Well-being, which are;

Keep Learning – we’re always learning about new art techniques and artists.

Give – we give each other support, help and an open ear.

Be Active – we encourage each other to get out to see exhibitions and go for walks.

Take Notice – we use the world around us for inspiration.

Connect – we connect with each other.

The group learned lots of new painting and printing techniques, experimented with applique and collage to make decorative pages for their journals.

They looked at artists such as Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin, Yayoi Kusama & Minnie Evans and found out about Outsider Art, Folk Art and Aboriginal Art. We visited the Victoria Miro gallery in London to see Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition, ‘The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe’ and experienced her Infinity Mirrored room, which was mesmerising! www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/528/

Feedback from participants  “It was fun and I especially liked making the different types of paper. I’m making my own at home this year.” Rachel
“It was a really fun and friendly group. We really enjoyed learning new art techniques and also sharing our ideas with each other. Using what we had created to make our own individual Well Being journals gave learning techniques additional purpose.” Janine
*This piece of research considers how to improve everyone’s mental capital and mental wellbeing through life. Evidence suggests that a small improvement in wellbeing can help to decrease some mental health problems and also help people to flourish. The research was commissioned by the Centre for well-being at NEF  to develop ‘five ways to wellbeing’: a set of evidence-based actions to improve personal wellbeing.