Save the date: Join us in May at London’s Southbank Centre for our next in-person artist peer group of 2024.
Established in 2015 our artist peer groups are an opportunity for artists exploring health and wellbeing in their practice to gain feedback and support on their projects, ideas or challenges that they are facing. The space is for active feedback, meaning that artists aren’t sharing finished works, but asking for specific support from others attending the session. Together we pool resources and provide feedback in a supportive environment. Click here to read more about how the groups work.
Our artists are Alice Burnhope and Alice Wisden. Alice Burnhope's work explores immersive sensorial experiences in textiles using waste materials, whilst Alice Wisden's work explores her experiences of epilepsy and how the creative process can support the recovery in the wake of her seizures.
This session is facilitated by artists Daniel Regan and Paloma Tendero.
If you have any questions about the event, including regarding accessibility, please contact us at info@artsandhealthhub.org.
Want to share your work at a future group? Fill out our application form.
Cost.
Pay What You Can (suggested donation: £5) / Free
Images: Alice Burnhope & Danny Robinson
About Alice Burnhope
Alice Burnhope is an award-winning textile artist and artist educator, based at Cockpit Studios Deptford, London. Alice specialises in socially-engaged artwork, co-creating immersive installations and sculptural wearable art with the public to support their wellbeing and connection to nature. Alice's practice is based in sustainable textile techniques, such as utilising waste materials and traditional crafts like natural dyeing, embroidery, patchwork, quilting, and pattern cutting. Her work is centred on the tactile human experience, how the body and mind responses to the textural surface qualities of the artwork and how their bodies are immersed within the piece to support their wellbeing. These sensorial qualities are inspired by Alice haptic experiences when immersed in nature to highlight the importance of the natural world and its therapeutic properties.
Alice is currently struggling with the tension between the two aspects to her work: her own artistic practice related to the human form and wellbeing, and then her socially-engaged practice which focuses on empowering and up-skilling community groups. She says:
"One absorbs the other until both become blurry ground for both myself and my audience. On the night I want to share my work to the group to get insights on how best to divide my practice as well as tips for development on some of my project ideas.”
Follow Alice on Instagram at @aliceburnhope.
Image: Alice Wisden
About Alice Wisden
Alice Wisden developed epilepsy in 2009 at the beginning of her professional career after completing a BA degree at Wimbledon College of Art. Suffering up to 10 tonic-clonic seizures a week, Alice had to move back to her parents to be cared for by her mother. Unable to be left alone and losing her independence and self-esteem, Alice experienced severe anxiety and mental health problems. After being diagnosed with epilepsy Alice spent several years trialling different combinations and doses of medication attempting to stabilise her condition. So finally allowed back out to play Alice is now a student at the Royal College Art, nearly halfway through an MA in Painting.
Developing a neurological disability has triggered Alice’s interest in the idea of art as an additional aid to pharmaceutical medication. Newly inspired by a potentially very destructive time in her practice, Alice has gained new insight into the power that artistic processes can have on cognitive recovery after seizures. By creating work in two very differently affected mental states of consciousness has opened Alice up to new and conflicting questions about the work that she creates.
“Navigating my way around disability language I am constantly confronted by controversy and contradictions. Am I mentally impaired, mentally disabled, suffering from a mental disorder or do I have a mental health problem? When approaching these terms I don’t just find myself misidentifying but also frighteningly misreading disability justice and the unsteady border surrounding the subject that I find conflicting. I have always been treated with very heavy medical treatment that has been vital in life saving situations although it has also been negatively overwhelming in long term treatment. In need of long term stability as a person with a disability I have discovered new objectives to consider in my process of creating art. I now analyse, interpret and evaluate the form and content of work created in different mental states. Whether suffering emotional mental trauma or experiencing slow recovery from a seizure, art has had a huge impact in the healing of my cognitive recognition and cuts my recovery time in half. An entirely new concept in my life as an artist that I have only discovered due to developing a disability.”
Follow Alice on Instagram at @alicewisden.
Alice’s work will briefly feature footage of epileptic seizure activity which some may find uncomfortable.