Join this free in-person event, exploring the emotional landscape of creative health practitioners working with people with challenging conditions or circumstances.

Creative health practitioners are artists who facilitate supportive and often transformative programmes to enhance the health, mental health and wellbeing of their participants. For the creative practitioner, this work frequently involves listening to and processing the personal experiences, needs, and joyful or difficult moments of their participants’ lives.

This participatory event will creatively portray the findings of a doctoral research project about UK creative health practitioners working with participants who have challenging health needs or life circumstances.

Collaborating with a mixed media artist and drawing on research summaries and stories, the event will highlight and validate the practitioners’ experiences and emotional labour; raise awareness about the complexity of the cross-disciplinary work they do; and consider practice and policy responses to appropriately value and support these efforts. Attendees will interact with the artwork and research findings through conversation, poetic and text-based responses.

This event is hosted by doctoral researcher Julia Puebla Fortier and artist Sarah Carpenter, with support from the LSHTM Public Engagement Grant fund.