An Artist’s Wellbeing

Creativity and working in the arts requires vulnerability, innovation, energy, and commitment. Self-care is essential in this, but is often easier said than done. Navigating the pressures of the arts industry, which are well-known, can impact our mental health. Join artist and Arts & Health Hub Director Daniel Regan for this creative session that explores the myriad of ways that we can care for ourselves in the work that we do as artists.

For 20 years Daniel has been working at the intersection of arts and health. His career spans producing commissions and works for galleries about his lived experiences of ill mental health to having a complimentary socially engaged practice that often explores complex and difficult subjects such as mental health, suicide, racism and loss, working in various community and clinical settings with often vulnerable participants. This rewarding, yet heavy work, can weigh on many of us who work in the Creative Health sector.

In autumn 2022 Daniel was awarded a bursary from a-n to explore the development of an individualised support framework to help him think about how to sustainably work in this sector, including working with experts to:

• Think about practical ways to manage fees and workloads, including building awareness of the ‘weight’ of current and upcoming works and emotional capacity to work on such projects;

• Explore how to better implement and ask for support when working on projects that have the potential for exposure to distressing conversations and content;

• Identify and notice via embodied methods when work is causing a significant disruption, and figuring out how to create change or process the residual feelings.

In this session Daniel will share his findings and will take you through a creative and collaborative exploration of what taking care of ourselves might look like, supporting you to gently build up the beginnings of your own support framework.

This session is ideal for artists working in the arts and health sector who are:

• Looking to explore setting professional and personal boundaries in their work;

• Exploring and defining what they need to do their best work;

• Making work that explores their lived experience of illness;

• Struggling to let go of the content they are exposed to at work.

The aerie professional development program will provide monthly workshops for artists. These workshops will aim to develop artists’ strategic skills in arts business, marketing and more.

There are limited places in each workshop.