The River Within Us

Nicola White

1
2
 Introduction
For many of the people we work with times are hard their
sense of continued belonging to a wider supportive community
is challenged. Groups and activities diminish as cuts to public
funding make their mark.

Across everything we do and everything we plan to do,

participation is key. It is invaluable. Through participation, we
understand what is important to people and gain insight into how
wider government policy impacts on their every day.

Sadly, we understand what austerity really means to people

who are dependent on support. We are witnessing a negative shift
in how disabled people are portrayed, encouraged and included
within our communities. Cuts to public services greatly reduce
the opportunity for disabled people to play a positive role within
their communities.

In response we see it as imperative that the arts continue
to instill a sense of purpose and agency within increasingly
disenfranchised communities.The long term value of
developmental arts practices is immeasurable and its continued
erosion is devastating.

To gain a deeper understanding of the effect of participation
we commissioned writer Nicola White to participate in
workshops at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. We asked her to
look at the impact and value of involvement in the arts from the
patients perspective.

What she found was enlightening.

3
4
 The River Within Us

Tuesday afternoon in the Glasshouses. A dozen of us gather

around the big tables and bend to our work. Theres some chat,
cups of hot tea are fetched from the kitchen, but mostly theres a
kind of absorbed murmur, clinks of brushes on the rims of jars.
Drawings, paintings and collages are in progress. A few people are
working on long-term projects, taking up where they left off the
week before. Others of us are making Scottish-themed work that
will provide a visual backdrop for a forthcoming Burns Supper in
the space.

Debbie, meanwhile, has chosen to make a pencil portrait of

David Bowie. He died earlier in the week, and she scrolls through
some photographs of him on her phone for inspiration. Its
important to me, she says.

We work shoulder to shoulder, engaged with what we are

making. It is a relaxing way to be with other people little
conversations spring up from our shared enterprise. At the other
table, someone compliments Peters pencil drawing of Rabbie
Burns, the way the background clouds flow in currents around
his head. Peter suddenly declaims The river is within us, the sea
is all about us! The words seem familiar to me, poetic, but also
important in a way I dont understand yet. Later, I google the
line and find it is indeed part of a poem, from TS Eliots Four
Quartets, a section which also includes the phrase, The sea has
many voices.

***

5
 In his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience1, Mihaly Cskszentmihlyi argues that people are
happiest when they are in a state of flow completely absorbed
or fully immersed in the activity that they are doing to the extent
that other concerns are forgotten. He describes it as an almost
automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness
that we experience when caught up in a meaningful challenge.

Creative activity provides exactly this kind of opportunity for

absorption. The task anchors us to the here and now, the progress
of the task moves us forward in time; there is a sense of something
developing.

Our desire for a task we can get lost in must account for last
years publishing phenomenon the huge sales of colouring
books aimed at adults. It shows that what many people desire is to
unplug from the chatter of the world and sit down with crayons
or pens to quietly fill in little spaces with colour. The success of
these books was linked to an upsurge of interest in the concept of
mindfulness an antidote to the idea that, our heads filled with
past regrets and future dreads, not to mention the distractions of
online living, we have forgotten how to be in the here and now.

The work that goes on in the Glasshouses contains an element

of that pleasure of making, its steadying quality, but goes so far
beyond that, into the making of original work. One of the long-
term participants, Heather, a painter of jewel-like watercolours,
says the pleasure of her painting practice lies in the fact that You
create something out of nothing. An idea that starts inside us is
made manifest through our bodys actions and the manipulation
of materials. It lets you do what you want to do, she adds.

6
 ***

The Glasshouses complex at Royal Edinburgh Hospital stands

on its own, a kind of rough oasis; a long bright studio with tables
and chairs and two plant-filled greenhouses extending off it.
Theres also a big open-to-everyone kitchen with a central table
that can seat a dozen people. Passing through the spaces, your eyes
are drawn everywhere to all the images and objects already made
or waiting to be taken up and used books to read, countless
pictures, small sculptures, bunting, signs, stacked plastic boxes full
of yarn, of paint, of shiny paper, of pens, of clay, of cardboard. A
hotchpotch of things that dissolve any tight formality. It feels like
a space with a past and a future.

People mill about volunteers, staff, workshop participants.

They come and go in the kind of atmosphere that is welcoming
without being forcefully so. Theres an ease to the place that is rare
and difficult to come by an ease that is dependent on goodwill,
knowledge and experience built up over years of work. Hard to
reproduce, all too easy to eradicate.

***

Many of the workshop participants have been making artwork

for years. They know what they want to achieve. The lead artist,
Anne Elliot, is there to assist them in that goal, to offer her skills
as a professional artist, to suggest solutions and strategies. To open
up new directions.

For less confident participants there are prompts that link

them to larger projects, like the images for the Burns Supper.

7
Throughout the year, the Glasshouses project arranges events
linked to the years round: end of year parties, summer fetes. Each
event is both a vehicle for creative work and an experience of
community.

The work is taken seriously, at whatever level of expertise. The

makers in the Glasshouse workshops show a marked respect for
their neighbours work. No-one is patronised. The work flows out
of the individual imagination to join the visible world.

It opens people up, says Susan, a regular volunteer at the

Tuesday sessions. No longer a patient at the Royal Edinburgh
Hospital, Susan comes back to the Glasshouses every week for
the community it provides and the opportunity to volunteer and
contribute.

***

In Ward 14, Ian is unsure about making a collage. He orders

the bits of paper in front of him, aligning them with the table,
anxiously tidying them into bundles. Anne explains what the aim
is, but Ian shakes his head, says he doesnt know anything about
that. She offers him a choice of background this one or this
one? Ian is suddenly more confident, pointing quickly to the one
on the right. The task proceeds in simple steps over the next forty
minutes. Ian, distracted sometimes, has no hesitancy about where
things should go in that moment, what the right choices are in
terms of colour and composition. He decides when it is complete.
Anne holds the abstract arrangement up to him. Yeah, he says
this looks good. His gaze is steady for all the time he looks at
what he has created.

8
 Meanwhile, across the table, Bobby measures a margin, a
pencil-line rectangle that will frame the picture he plans to draw.
For thirty minutes he measures the gap between edge of the paper
and the line; rubs out most of what he does, starts again. Things
have to be right. Just when you think he will never start, his
pencil jumps to the centre of the page, and he draws at a furious
pace, improvising his own version of a picture from a magazine.
He is still drawing when the session ends, but asks someone to
store the drawing until he can work on it next. He doesnt want
to lose it. He is worried someone might tear it up, not realising its
value.

***

Ward 14 residents are older men with various forms of

dementia and memory loss. Because of their cognitive difficulties,
patients can find it difficult to get involved with unfamiliar
processes. Vanessa, the Activities Co-ordinator in Ward 14, is a
crucial bridge she knows the patients well, she knows who is
having a good or bad day, the skills in drawing or making that
these men may already possess, ready to be re-engaged. Staff can
make a huge difference to the success of a project.

Artist James Mclardy has completed an ambitious project with

Ward 14. Realising that the men he was working with possessed
dormant practical skills from previous jobs in construction,
woodwork or decorating, James introduced materials associated
not with fine art, but with trade skills planks of wood, standard
paint brushes, graining tools. With these, the men created a giant
floor sculpture of individually decorated parts that can be put
together in multiple ways, like a giant construction kit.

9
The making and re-making of this assembly engaged the men in
a remarkable way, and continues to do so. It is something quite
different from the daily hospital round, allowing them scope to be
designers, decision makers, constructors.

***

The value of creative activity to patients at Royal Edinburgh

Hospital is something more understood in the experience of it
than in any retelling. Value is a slippery thing to gauge. And
the attempts to measure value can obscure the thing being
valued, often concentrating on numbers and aggregates rather
than individual experience. But in a time of decreasing public
resources, the need to find ways of articulating the worth of
creativity is crucial, a constant challenge.

In the world of health care, solutions that are evidence based

have the greatest purchase. Things that can be measured are held
up as more legitimate and trustworthy than things that are felt or
intuited.

In an academic paper from 2008, Evaluating the impact of

participatory art projects for people with mental health needs,2 the
authors acknowledge the difficulty of collecting and analysing
data in this area, yet go on to conduct what they describe as the
first systematic outcome study in the UK involving a substantial
number of arts participants with mental health needs. The survey
does not talk about the nature of the arts activity that people
participated in, though it does acknowledge that the period of
six months that the survey covers is a limited span. Whatever the
shortcomings of the method, it is interesting that the results of

10
the study show improvements in mental health, social inclusion
and empowerment (as evaluated by participants themselves) but
that the greatest gain from involvement in the arts was in the
sense of empowerment.

***

The circled chairs in one of the glasshouses gradually fill up

with people who have come to take part in the singing group. We
have folders full of songs, and we take it in turns to choose the
next song to sing. Some familiar tunes have new lyrics, re-written
by the group to reflect their personal experiences.

Andrea has brought a suggestion of a new number for the

group, called Fight Song. It is a defiant song of survival, and
Andrea has devised gestures to underline its meaning. We give
it a go. Once you give yourself up to the singing, once you step
over the embarrassment threshold, the shared experience is hugely
enlivening.

Davy has chosen a song he wants to get up and dance to.

There are hoots of encouragement. Davy moves to the centre of
the circle and dances to the music with a combination of pleasure
and diligence. Again, I have that feeling of being supported by
the people around me. Penny is the one facilitating the group,
providing the underlying thrust and rhythm of her guitar, but it
is the group as a whole that allows you to contribute as you want,
that encourages you beyond your inhibitions.

***

11
 The idea of agency seems to me central to the work, a term
that embraces personal empowerment and the opportunity
to make autonomous choices that affect your life and your
environment. Seen from the outside, these choices may seem small
a strip of coloured paper placed here, not there; a group of people
singing the song you chose but to someone dealing with adverse
circumstances or serious illness, they can have immense power. In
an interview with artists working at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital3,
the writer and curator Kirsten Lloyd notes that a minute can be
as powerful as a two hour long session, and that patience and
perseverance are essential in the search for something meaningful.

This meaningfulness resides not just in the process of

making, and the pleasures of absorption and community that
come with that process: the artworks that result from the process
have meaning also, as does the experiencing of those artworks or
performances by an audience.

Participants in the workshops care about the quality of what

they create, and are invested in the idea of doing more, doing
better. At the Tuesday workshop, when I asked Phil what was more
important to him, the making or the result, he said the finished
drawing (a beautiful, energetic latticework of bold black lines) was
what mattered most. Something to show for your effort added
Gerry, beside him. But perhaps the question introduced a false
dichotomy, as surely the quality of the experience of making is
inseparable from the quality of thing that is made.

The provision of meaningful creative activity creates a

powerful third space between the institution and the private
realm. People take part not as patients receiving treatment but
as individuals with something to contribute. This third space is

12
both a physical place and a conceptual one. It is physical in the
sense that the Glasshouses or the temporary activity spaces in
the wards provide places where new and experimental activities
happen. The creative making of objects and images is radically
different from the usual round of the hospital day, where patients
are receivers of care, of medication, of meals, of directions from
staff. Time can hang heavily.

In his recent work on loneliness, neuroscientist John Cacioppo

outlines the importance of feeling we are adding to, rather than
taking from, our social connections. One of the things we have
learned is that avoiding loneliness is not about getting, not about
being a recipient. Despite what economists say, that is not how we
are designed.4

Creativity changes the polarity of interactions, and this is

where that third space becomes both conceptual and radical;
an open-ended process where ideas can be tried out, played with,
discarded or embraced.

Critic Nicholas Bourriaud echoes this finding in the context

of socially engaged art practices in his book Relational Aesthetics;
art is the place that produces a specific sociability, precisely
because it tightens the space of relations.5

Peter, with his spontaneous Eliot quote, evokes this elusive

process best. The river is within us, the sea is all about us.
Humans need to contribute their talents, their imaginations and
unique points of view to something greater. To become involved
in the making of art is to become involved in the making of
meaning. By doing it we take our place in the sea of voices that
is our culture.

13
1
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0-06-092043-2

2
Hacking, S; Secker, J; Spandler, H; Kent, L; and Shenton, J. (2008)
Evaluating the impact of participatory art projects for people with
mental health needs. Health and Social Care in the Community

3
Lloyd, K (2014) Uncommon Ground Radical approaches to
Artistic Practice, Artlink, 2014

4
Cacioppo, J, as interviewed by Tim Adams in The Observer
28/2/16

5
Bourriaud, N (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du rel,
2002. ISBN 2-84066-060-1

14
15
Artlink has enriched my
life; its an enjoyable and
stimulating environment. I
have gained support from it in
the past and its great to be able
to give support back through
volunteering.
Karina Volunteer, Royal Edinburgh Hospital project
It allows me the space and time
to relax and be myself, and I
really enjoy that we can support
each other in the group.
Maggie Participant and artist,

Royal Edinburgh Hospital project

In the last year Artlink:
Created

400
making sessions with

30
learning disabled
young people and
their families,
establishing imaginative
community links to support
better transition from school
to community.

Worked with

40 people with
severe / profound
learning disabilities
exploring new ways of
sustaining involvement in
activities, promoting new
forms of learning and
stimulating more informed
care networks.
 Organised
care staff development
programmes designed to
stimulate wider interests,
build care staff confidence
and enhance ways of caring.

Supported 10 seminars and

40 exhibitions for

25,000 audiences
in hospitals, arts spaces, universities and
community venues throughout Edinburgh
and the Lothians.

Provided participative
activities in anything from
storytelling, singing and
cabaret on wards and

4
public spaces in

hospital sites for

4090 participants.
Created

900 sessions for

165 people
with enduring mental health
problems, establishing
relevant support networks
for people in hospital care or
living in the community.

Undertook

1080
to cultural events in
outings

Edinburgh to open up access

and participation in the arts
for disabled people and those
who are elderly and isolated.

Created 11 artists' research events

9
and supported investigative placements

with 234 sensory impaired individuals

exploring the creative
potential of access services.
 Linked to

4 academic institutions:
University of St Andrews,
University of Edinburgh,
University of Dundee and
Glasgow School of Art
as part of long term plans
to establish research
partnerships to understand
the impact of our work.

Produced

4 publications
exploring how the arts
contributes to individual
agency and improved care
environments.

Worked with

5 writers

110 musicians 111 volunteers

40 9
and
mentored early career
visual artists artists
You feel involved and valued, not a
faceless demographic. I develop a sense of
collective ownership of each of the projects.
The emphasis is on collaboration between
the artists/staff and ourselves. Everyone's
opinions matter and they are respectfully
explored in a structured way.
Ann Participant,
Investigate Create programme Edinburgh
www.investigatecreate.co.uk
Artlink takes you out of isolation and gives
you a reason to get out the house. It gives you
a focus, an opportunity to learn new skills
and access to culture. Artlink's different from
other groups. It's unique, more open and
you can bounce ideas off people. Its good
to talk to people about creative ideas and
get feedback; I don't get that opportunity
anywhere else.
Louise Participant, Curious Routes project Edinburgh

www.curiousroutes.co.uk
Artlink are the sole non-governmental
organisation who have done anything to
improve the life of our son Donald. So for
all the the organisations there are, (charity
funded or otherwise) for the benefit of people
with learning disability, Autism, Downs
Syndrome, mental health problems, etc.
Artlink is the only one who have sought out
people like Donald in order to offer help of
any kind! This perhaps could be surprising
to many people who, when hearing of your
organisation, assume it to be merely another
arty farty group, instead of the real person-
centred group you are.
David Father of participant, Ideas Team project Midlothian
www.ideasteam.org
Nicola White is a writer
based in Scotland. She
writes about art, care and
memory alongside short
and long fiction.

Her first novel, In the

Rosary Garden, won the
Dundee International
Book Prize.
Artlink
13a Spittal Street,
Edinburgh,
EH3 9DY

0131 229 3555

info@artlinkedinburgh.co.uk

www.artlinkedinburgh.co.uk

Artlink Edinburgh & the Lothians is registered in Scotland No. 87845

with charitable status Scottish Charity No. SC006845.