Mansfield Museum successfully obtained funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to undertake the Creative Women Together project. This holistic and therapeutic project gives women at risk a special creative experience they can be proud of.
Introduction
For groups marginalised by society, a combination of discrimination, prejudice, socio-economic deprivation, stigma and life circumstances, can increase their risk of poor health. Focused on participatory activities for such groups in the museum, this project tests the museum’s potential to make a difference. Mansfield has high levels of deprivation and too many women here experience violence, abuse and trauma. This holistic and therapeutic project gives women at risk a special creative experience they can be proud of. Mansfield Museum successfully obtained funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to undertake this important work; the Creative Women Together project.
The challenge
The 2020 Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) report into the role of arts for improving health and wellbeing found strong evidence for the use of the arts to support aspects of social cohesion and to improve wellbeing in adults (Warran, Aughterson, & Fancourt, 2020). Evidence from the three years of the Museums on Prescription program also found significant improvements in wellbeing which were sustained beyond the life of the project (Chatterjee, 2020). Our curator describes Mansfield Museum as a community centre with a collection. Already a trusted hub embedded in its locality, the museum has a well-established social role in support of local people. However, it hasn’t reached the boundaries of its potential to include, and is therefore well-placed to offer a project which reaches out to disadvantaged women.
The solution
Our Creative Women Together project is designed to improve the wellbeing of vulnerable women through the therapeutic power of hands-on art activities. The goals of the project are:
- to build self-confidence
- to make friends and connections
- to take pride in creation
- to increase sense of place
- to continue to support longer term, post project.
Building relationships with services was the starting point to finding participants. We began with domestic violence, sexual abuse and vulnerable people’s services and these led to social prescribers and contact with the domestic violence team at the Department for Work and Pensions.
We set up five groups with five themes, working with clay, print, weave, felt and metal. Over the two years’ of the project, each group will work with each material. The outcomes are directed by women’s interests and to generate ideas we are opening up the museum store, exploring, discovering, photographing, working with designs and ideas inspired by the museum’s objects and stories, to tease out the women, the ‘her-stories’. We found a woman wrestler imagined by pop artist Peter Blake in 1968; a Victorian portrait of a mill owner’s wife; a futurist ballet dancer; samplers sewn by 18th century girls; a collage of customers in a local haberdashery shop; Edith Wainwright, one of only a handful of female mayors in Mansfield’s history; and images of female figures representing faith, hope and charity on ceramic lustreware. We focus on the process of making and document with photography. Being involved in a physical activity such as making felt or a clay tile or a digital portrait engages the hands and lends itself to unselfconscious talk. New friendships and peer networks are being forged, and some women are now meeting independently outside the sessions.
The impact
We are finding that working with relatively small groups (maximum ten participants, and usually fewer) means that we can be very responsive to the interests of the group. For example by a happy accident a demonstration tile cracked in the kiln and this led to an investigation of the therapeutic effects of Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold), not disguising the cracks but using the 400-year-old technique to highlight the "scars" as a part of the design. The participants in this group were very enthusiastic about the metaphor of their rebuilding of lives and self after trauma being reflected in the Kintsugi technique. The various elements of this project within its museum setting included:
- creative discussions with our art therapist
- input from freelance artists bringing their community practice
- a sensitive childcare provider
- art teaching experience and the knowledge
- skills and sheer kindness of the museum staff producing workshops which allow a state of mindful engagement and enjoyment for participants, and a feel-good effect for all involved.
We are using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale to measure impact and will also undertake participant interviews as the project progresses. This mixed-methods approach should yield quantitative and qualitative analysis, of use to the participants who can review their responses over time if they desire, and of benefit to the museum’s evaluation as well as providing data for an upcoming doctoral study.
How is the new approach being sustained?
Two years of funding allows us to build strong relationships and gives us time to develop new skills, and as we deliver workshops and explore the stories of local women in the museum collection, we are identifying potential projects and ideas for longer term engagement beyond the duration of the project. For example, a conservation workshop is planned, delivered by a collections expert from the National Trust. This could lead to participants taking on responsibility for an element of the museum collection (for example the ceramics) with a view to conserving, researching and exhibiting. Developing confidence could see participants delivering their own workshops, for example, Becky who is an expert in crochet. She made a crochet Darth Vader for one of the other group members and has now volunteered to make a crochet wind turbine for the museum’s upcoming climate exhibition! A weekly meeting for participants is planned to provide a site for continued engagement at the museum. Volunteering at the museum is another opportunity to sustain engagement post project. Museum staff have noted participants returning with family members and our social media updates add pride to the participants’ confidence.
We have two exhibitions planned in March 2023 and a larger exhibition and celebration in March 2024, both events to coincide with International Women’s Day. The exhibitions will be co-created by the participants, focusing on process through photography and film as well as outcomes in ceramic, felt, textiles, screen-printing and metalwork and enameling. A project mobile phone is proving useful for communicating between sessions. Each group has a WhatsApp group which means we can remind participants of dates and times and share photographs of their work and of relevant artworks, connections and museum objects. Each woman is given a sketchbook and they use these to make notes and drawings and sometimes prepare ideas for next sessions. It is nice to see that fairly quickly, in some of the groups, the women have begun to chat to each other, and to share jokes and tips.
Lessons learned
Creative Women Together is a work in progress, we began in March 2022 and the delivered phase of the project will complete in March 2024. This project is a learning experience, for the participants, for me and the museum. The collaboration with the referring services, freelance artists, museum staff and art therapist is proving really rich. The speed of referrals from a widening range of services is testament to the need for a social and creative space and we already have several instances of women recruiting others.
The administration is considerable; as the women attest, summoning the courage to attending the first workshop is a big step for many. Coming out, arriving at a new place, meeting new people, not knowing what to expect, these are big challenges and some work is required to enable participants to attend. We make sure the women are given many opportunities to attend, holding workshops on different days of the week, at a variety of times, as well as lots of encouragement. The barriers to attendance can be financial, practical and social. We are trying to remove or lower these barriers by funding the transport costs of participants and providing free childcare in the museum. The workshops are free and include all art materials and refreshments. Holding some workshops on the museum’s closed day has been useful in allaying some participants’ social anxieties. We have found that trips to art galleries and museums (a day out) are an effective way of creating group cohesion. We invited training from Nottinghamshire Independent Domestic Abuse Services (NIDAS) for all museum staff, this was helpful and increased our confidence regarding safeguarding and disclosure policies. Regular checking in and updating will be important too. We also have supervision in place to ensure that all involved are supported.
Time will tell if we are making a difference to vulnerable women’s lives but, so far, the participants who have attended are mostly returning and we are having fun!
Contact
Tamsin Greaves, email: [email protected]