Links between creativity; art; health; ritual; medicine and performance are well documented as having existed since modern humans emerged as the dominant species some 150,000 years ago. Evidently, we felt the need to consider and process our experience of living re-presenting and sharing it in one form or another. Telling a story; singing it in a song; painting; sculpting an image of it or writing it down - the aim is the same - to hold a moment in common and share the lives we lead with one another. To be heard, seen and sense the connection and community bond that such experience creates. That fundamental need for human connection that the arts, (in particular participatory and community arts), with the shared power and creative engagement provided is vital, as was evident during the height of the pandemic in 2020-21.
Over the last 20+ years as the evidence base has grown, Creative Health initiatives have become more accepted by the infrastructure around arts funding nationally and within some health and social care services. A national infrastructure has developed that includes All Party Parliamentary Group for Arts and Health (APPG), National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH), Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA), Lived Experience Network (LENS), National Academy for Social prescribing (NASP) and numerous research groupings within UK Universities.
Nationally there are now islands of truly progressive public policy and commissioning for mental health, community cohesion and social justice that the arts and health (or now more commonly called ‘Creative Health’) sector has helped to create. Kirklees, in West Yorkshire is one of those islands and is part of that nurturing, growth and system change.
Regionally West Yorkshire is currently developing a Cultural Strategy that we are hoping will include Creative health as a cross cutting strand.
"If art is the act of making and sharing meaning and thus defining the human experience, then self-evidently, it is, or should be, available to everyone."
'A Restless Art’; Francois Matarasso
