“Learning to cope with uncertainty” — prescribing creativity to health professionals during Covid
A Cultural Institute interview with ‘Art Doctor’ Alison McIntyre about their Beyond Measure? creative prescribing project for clinicians in Leeds
How would you describe the work with Beyond Measure?
“We’ve been commissioned by the Beyond Measure programme to create something we’re calling a ‘creative prescribing’ project. We have a small cohort of healthcare professionals, including a student, a social prescriber, a GP, and wellbeing coordinator.
We have been doing online consultations with the participants to discuss how they’re coping— particularly how they feel about COVID and lockdown — and talk to them about what they do creatively in their lives already.
We’ve worked with them whether they would like to be challenged or whether they want to stay in their comfort zone, and then we suggest creative activity that they might like to try and take part in.
After a couple of weeks we return with a follow-up session to talk through how it’s gone. And we’ve also set up an online community for the first time as art doctors, so that the participants could share what they were doing as they went along, and they could talk to each other as well as to us. Finally, from those consultations and the things that the cohort has shared with us, we’re making a film for the Beyond Measure programme.”
How is it different to other work the Art Doctors have done ?
“It’s actually been really quite a different project for us. We started off doing as Arts Doctors prescribing pieces of artwork, and it was very much about barriers to contemporary art, particularly in art galleries.
As things have moved on, our work evolved to focus on mental health and whether art is good for you. We’ve moved into this idea about creativity and talking about whether you could prescribe everyday creativity to people as well as prescribing them pieces of artwork to go and see.
It’s broadened the scope of what we as Arts Doctors can be.
Up until lockdown, we focused on live events, festivals, or working with Thackray Medical Museum with their emergency ambulance when they were shut down for refurbishment. With art galleries, our approach is to accosted people in our Art Doctor costumes and stethoscope.
When lockdown started, Liz Stirling and I just wanted to connect and do something together, even if we couldn’t be together. So we created lockdown films that we released weekly on social media and they were really popular with lots of other people — people seem to really enjoy them and get a lot out of them. And they were all things you could just do creatively at home with things that you just had around your house.
Our work with Beyond Measure? has been another transition really. What’s been brilliant is that possibility of working with the same people over a longer period of time, which we’ve never done. We often ask people to give us feedback or post what they’ve made on social media. But you’ve had a real-life moment, you’ve given them an actual prescription, and they’ve gone off, and you never really know whether they’ve done it, what effect it had, how it worked for them, or if it did.
We’ve relished the opportunity to work with the same group of people in those online conversations, and for them being able to share digitally. The conversations haven’t just been sharing what the artworks made by the participants, they’ve also been sharing articles and books.
But it’s also been how we cope, and creativity, and thinking about COVID and this collective trauma that we’re all experiencing at the moment.
I posted that online, and it created another wonderful conversation on Twitter and Facebook. Somebody suggested maybe that we would do a book group, which is a fantastic idea. The Beyond Measure? project has been a wonderful way to expand the scope of what we can do. In particular, we’ve had the opportunity to create a community of people who we can work with, and discuss in more depth about various issues. So, whilst we’re very silly and fun and accessible, we’ve been able to explore the actual very serious, important things that are happening underneath that that underpin it all.”
How did you navigate the challenge of creating a community without ever physically meeting?
“I think generally people have found the project a really safe space to be able to share what they’ve been doing, and know that everybody’s very supportive within that space.
At first, it was quite new and I think there was a nervousness amongst participants. But we created the community using the app Slack, so it was a very private space.
There was a feeling that the sense of community was held by the project.
Rather than just having these momentary connections or a planned, scheduled thing, it feels like there’s a connection there for whenever you want it, whenever you choose it. I think people have felt really positive about that.
We would really like to find a way to continue that community. There are a lot of people out there in the arts and cultural creative world, the healthcare world, and mental health and wellbeing world, who really want to have these conversations. We found that we can provide that space, which is valuable for the cohort and valuable for us as well.
What is the value of this approach?
It’s the idea about being able to go into more depth about these connections, and to be able to continue working with that same group of people.
But it’s also the conversations themselves. It wasn’t an individual experience for each participant to do their creative activity on their own. Instead, we’ve ended up had two or three conversations with each participant. And, instead of concentrating on ‘What did you do?’, we’ve been asking: ‘How have you found this process? What’s been of value to you?”
One thing that came up is the gateway between those two worlds that we have made in this projects.
We all make all sorts of assumptions about the things that we know. For us, the project became a gateway into a different healthcare world. But also for the participants, the project was a gateway into our world.”
What has been one of the most memorable outcomes of the project?
“The GP that we’ve been working with talked about his work in quite a surprising way.
We often see GPs as someone who can fix you — you go to your doctor, and they’ll tell you what to do, and you’ll get better. But for most of the people who he sees, he can’t ‘fix’ them. During our conversations, he reflected that for those people his role is really as a listener, and bearing testament to the story that these people have, and that they need to be heard.
That was such a wonderful connection with what we’re doing.
When we first started doing this, we were really surprised how many people wanted to have a conversation with us. We thought we would be most people would be like, oh God who’s that dressed in stupid coats and don’t want to talk to them. But because we’re silly and fun and accessible, people are interested.
But then people were really up for that conversation about how they felt about contemporary art or how they felt about health and wellbeing and art and creativity. So many people in the street wanted to have that conversation, and it’s been lovely to see that synergy between what is happening in healthcare.
Healthcare is partly there to hear and listen, to bear witness, and to hold people’s narratives.
And that that is often what feels really important for us as well. Even if we’re only seeing someone for a couple of minutes at a festival, there’s a moment that’s quite intimate. Once they’re attracted by the silliness, that conversation bit can become quite intimate very quickly. And it’s holding that safe space for them even for a little brief bit of time. And then they go off again and out into the rest of their lives.”
What impacts do you think the project will have?
“I think that the impact on us as Art Doctors has been to broaden our scope. It’s wonderful to work on a project where we can think about what it is that we’re doing, and why.
We are silly, and Art Doctors is fun. It has to have the enjoyment and the joy in it. But this project has helped us to recognise the value of it and the very serious underpinning of our work, through the conversations that we’ve had. That feeling of creating a community feels like the pilot. We’ve shown that we can create a space where people can have these conversations. That’s been so valuable that for each project that we might do in future, we would like to create a more discreet private project space where just people working on that can share what they’re doing.
From seeing similarities between health and the arts, and understanding social prescribing more, we can now think about future collaborations within the healthcare world. We’re beginning to think about our potential role within a social prescribe.”
How can you evidence this?
“We looked at some of the tools of social prescribing, such as a wellbeing wheel which was suggested by social prescriber who’s within our cohort in order to measure impact for those individuals. It’s that struggle of trying to measure things that took place over a short space of time. I think there was a resistance with trying to put those numbers on it.
And in part that’s due to the nature of the work. We got qualitative feedback such as ‘I feel like it’s made me think about this in a different way’, or ‘It’s helped me make a connection between what I’ve done in this activity and what’s happening in the world, and how I can cope with that in a slightly different way’. “
How do the practitioners’ own experiences fit into this project?
“There’s a lot of ‘failing’ in what we do. We’re very keen on the idea that you don’t have to come up with a perfect thing at the end of this. It’s all about just enjoying it, experiencing it and making something. It doesn’t have to be perfect piece of artwork.
I worked with a participant who was already drawing and painting, which she’d used through the first lockdown. We first started speaking in early September and she told us that she wanted us to challenge her and and take her out of her comfort zone. In that initial consultation, we talked a lot about her paintings, which were very precise, very controlled. She would take photographs, and tried to make her paintings look almost exactly like the photograph.
I prescribed her to make a paper sculpture that was not representative of anything. She had to approach it totally differently. She had to make something without having an end-product in mind. She made a sculpture with by cutting out paper, scrunching it, and putting things together. In the end, she actually made it into a tree — but it was unknown at the start.
When we came back to talk together, she talked about how it was quite scary because she didn’t know where it was going and she didn’t feel in control. It was a difficult thing — but it was also enjoyable.
She very consciously took the things that were making her feel uncomfortable and just put them to one side and carried on making the thing she was uncertain about. She didn’t know when to stop. She didn’t know when it was finished. But she was able to focus on the fact that she enjoyed it.
When we talked about it, there was a real connection with what we’re all coping with at the moment. We’re in a place where we don’t know how this is going to end. There’s a real uncertainty about everything and where we’re going.
By sitting in that place where those feelings are really difficult, but it’s been okay — there’s definitely a connection with the wider experiences that practitioners are feeling at the moment.
It’s too short of time to tell whether that actually changes the way she thinks. But she certainly made that connection for herself. She created another painting, consciously thinking ‘I’m not going to control this, I’m not going to work out what it’s going to be at the end, I’m just going to paint and sit and just be much freer and much less precise and controlling’— and she just created this wonderful painting.
She shared the painting on the community, and it got an incredible response from the rest of the cohort. The process has been really interesting — especially when we consider what we’re all dealing with at the moment.”
Beyond Measure? is a programme of digital engagement exploring
research and evidence in culture and health, organised by the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds
Please join the the conversation using the hashtag #BeyondMeasure on Twitter.
The 2020 programme is in collaboration with the Centre for Cultural Value, and Leeds Arts Health and Wellbeing Network, with generous support from the Oakley Memorial Fund.
The Art Doctors playfully break down barriers to participation in contemporary art, and explore the positive role of creativity in all our lives.
“We gather near art galleries and at other events, wearing our paint splattered coats and stethoscopes, and with prescription pads at the ready. We’ll either prescribe some art for you to go and look at or maybe an everyday creative activity for you to try at home.
We love thinking about art and creativity as a starting point for conversations and we firmly believe that every response is valid and important, whether you see yourself as an expert or not. We also believe in the power of FUN.”
The Art Doctors are Leeds-based artists Alison McIntyre and Liz Stirling, with regular special guest appearances from consultants, specialists and junior doctors.
