Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Well-Making and Making-Well: Craft, Design and Everyday Creativity for Health and Well-Being, Dec 2022

This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between workshops, as method (and methodology), and the research/knowledge that emerges from and through them. The ‘workshop’ is understood as the structural relationship between people, processes, materials and place, while ‘work’ is the knowledge/research that emerges from these interactions. While different in intent and structure, both projects share concerns about making, health and well-being. Craftivist Garden #wellMAKING worked with a network of local amateur craft groups across the United Kingdom to think critically about health and well-being, while Kotha and Kantha examined how stitch serves as an alternative well-making strategy for a group of Bangladeshi-born women living in Manchester, United Kingdom. The article argues that thinking about the workshop as a ‘holding form’ and/or ‘bloom space’ and paying attention to the stories told and artefacts (knowledge objects) made in workshops is vital to understanding their value.

Within the growing body of research on creative arts practices in community settings and mental health and well-being, the craft of jewellery-making has not featured strongly, and understanding from contextual, critical sociological perspectives has not been widely developed. This article reports on ethnographic research undertaken with an older women’s adult community learning (ACL) jewellery-making group, using theories of ecological and relational agency and insights from feminist theorizing to help elucidate its social, creative, educational and mental health and well-being-related generative processes. Findings are presented along two main, interrelated themes: creative agency and shared learning, and the social generativity of the group. The focus is on the transgressive, resistive and expansive aspects of the group’s interactions within the wider socio-economic, sociopolitical and cultural context of the women’s lives. Implications for enacting the mental health and well-being agenda in ACL are discussed.

While some maker activities and actions have clear and measurable outcomes with increasing research about the joys and benefits of creativity, there is an aspect of making which is infrequently considered, perhaps because it is largely unconscious or may even be viewed negatively or dismissively. This is the pleasure to be found in the nostalgic aspects of crafting and making. This article examines the current research on the benefits of nostalgia, and how craft activities invoke nostalgia in various ways. Nostalgia is implicated as an element which can contribute to well-being – the perception of purpose, control and satisfaction which supports health and happiness. Although nostalgia is also already a factor in some making projects designed around well-being and health, it might in the future be used more consciously to contribute to other well-making activities.

The potential of a radically Indigenous and endangered textile to improve human well-being and environmental health is the subject of an ongoing cross-disciplinary and multi-faceted research project between the United Kingdom and Uganda. This article presents the researchers’ findings to date on Ugandan barkcloth, produced from the mutuba tree and part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Methods included fieldwork in Uganda, natural dye experiments, testing a biodesign strategy, textile laboratory testing and scientific laboratory testing of the unique antimicrobial properties of barkcloth. Although beginning with artistic, practice-based research, the group uncovers important knowledge that may provide significant medical science benefits. They identify the central role of the mutuba tree in restorative and agroforestry systems; create natural dyes that may confer barkcloth’s properties to other materials. Thus demonstrating barkcloth production as a truly slow fashion textile and well-making system that promotes the well-being of people and planet in multiple ways.

With digital connections through social media platforms becoming more prevalent in our lives and climate anxiety now commonplace there is a need to understand ways to create deeper, more meaningful connections to each other, the things around us and the planet we live on. Handmaking through digital platforms may offer these connection opportunities. Remaking can take that a step further and offer tactile solutions informed by digital connections that can help combat climate anxiety. However, to successfully utilize social media channels we need to better understand how online making promotes well-being (well-making) and how that experience differs from or intersects with making in an offline context. This article explores a making and design approach that can move beyond the social media ‘filter defence’ through collaborative remaking on Instagram, helping people individually and collectively increase our personal (and planetary) well-being.

This article explores how the pandemic has caused Arts Well, a small United Kingdom arts and health organization, to reflect on its future activities in order to be most useful in the space where arts and creativity meets health and well-being. It highlights the need for training, professional development and support for creative practitioners delivering participatory creative opportunities, recognizing the precarious work environment and emotionally demanding contexts in which they often work. Arts Well is also developing a campaign to raise awareness of the value of engaging in the arts and well-making to protect and improve health and well-being.

This photo essay shows work made during ‘ReCast’, a short creative residency led by British Ceramics Biennial in partnership with Stoke Recovery Service. Images of the making process and final pieces are combined with first-hand participant-accounts articulated through poetry. Focusing on an experimental approach to making and firing, the processes used involve a high degree of risk. The element of risk is key to allowing clients to challenge behaviours such as perfectionism and exploring the presence and absence of control within a supported environment. Participants were encouraged to reflect throughout on the parallels between the recovery process and the ceramic process, both in a wider context and in relation to their own personal experience. The quality of the work produced reflects the clients’ openness to experimentation and many express a sense of achievement, having clearly left their comfort zone far behind.