Fragments: An Arts for Health Residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland

A rare and brief opportunity for peer support and sharing of arts and health practice with Artists Charlotte Donovan, Marielle MacLeman, Sarah Ruttle and Kirsty Stansfield.

For the residency at Uillin, Kirsty was able to contribute our preliminary ideas around how autonomy could be integrated into a reflective creative arts and health practice.

Sarah, Marielle and Charlotte brought a significant amount of experience in arts and health practice to the table and I was able to introduce some of our keys ideas around expanding the holistic approach used to assess and review a patient’s needs within palliative care to include environment, dialogue and sensory experience.

I also proposed that a deeper understanding of autonomy could help structure an arts and health practitioner’s reflective practice and help to identify what may be undermining or acting in support of a participant’s autonomy and experience of a creative encounter.

The residency came in the early days of articulating our ideas for the Tracing Autonomy Framework and it highlighted to me that we needed to be clearer in the language we were using to describe the characteristics of autonomy in order to make this more accessible.

Importantly it also highlighted to me the value in meeting with experienced arts and health practitioners to have opportunities to share experience and explore the challenges we all encounter as practitioners in a useful, focused and constructive manner. Personally I felt that a relational understanding of autonomy goes some way to offer structure to intuitive and perceptive modes of working with people.

The residency included a small-scale ‘open studio’ for members of the public and we were able to share some aspects of our conversation around autonomy and arts and health practice more generally.

Description of the residency can be found here.

Many thanks to Uillin West Cork Arts Centre.