Arts and Health Mini Mentorships
A partnership between The Cad Factory’s CASE Incubator Studio and the Arts Health Network NSW/ACT (AHNNA) with UNSW, St Vincent’s Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital (Randwick)
The Arts and Health mini-mentorships program is five day initiative delivered by multiple partners to support the development of arts and health practices. These mentorships provide a unique opportunity for immersion into diverse arts and health practices and contexts in order to develop practice, expand networks, and provide learning opportunities.
About AHNNA
The Arts Health Network NSW/ACT is the peak advocacy and advisory body in the field of creative arts and health. The Network's members include artists, practitioners, program developers and leaders, social enterprise creators, social change agents and researchers in arts and health, covering a wide range of issues, approaches and specialist areas.
AHNNA's aim is to support, promote and advocate for the use of creative arts in ways that increase health and wellbeing. AHNNA brings together two complex areas: Arts and Health, for the benefit of a third: the community. Our goal is to facilitate interactions and conversations across these two sectors, and to develop and provide resources, support and capacity in the service of our vision of individual and collective flourishing as founded in human creativity and connection.
Day 1 : Monday 9 September 2024 and
Day 5: Friday 13 September 2024
The Cad Factory
Day 1 will be an opportunity for all artists to meet together at The Cad Factory’s CASE Incubator Studio in Rosebery to hear about the work of The Cad Factory and to discuss each other’s practices. This day will be led by Cad Factory Artistic Director Vic McEwan.
Day 5 all participants will convene at the CASE Incubator Studio to reflect on their experiences.
Vic McEwan
Vic McEwan is a contemporary socially engaged artist and researcher working with sound, photography, video, installation, and performance. He is the Artistic Director and co-founder of the Cad Factory, a “regional, artist-led organisation collaborating ethically with people and place to create a local, national and international program of experimental work”. Over the past 15 years Vic has established partnerships with diverse non-arts sectors and communities, and has co-founded the CASE Incubator Studio, a national hub for the development of socially engaged art practices.
Vic has toured work in diverse locations ranging from The National Museum of Australia and the banks of the Baaka/Darling River to diverse clinical and health spaces. As a regular conference speaker and advocate for the arts, he has delivered over 100 keynotes, invited talks and panel presentations.
Vic currently holds a Regional Arts Australia Fellowship. He is a board member of MusicNSW, has contributed to the curatorial strategies of both the Griffith Hospital and the Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) Hospital (2022-23) and is an executive member of the Arts and Health Network NSW/ACT.
Vic holds a first-class Honours of Creative Practice (Fine Arts), for which he received the university medal, and a Master of Arts Practice with High Distinction. He was the first artist to earn an arts-led PhD from the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, receiving the Faculty Thesis Excellence Award and the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Distinctive Australian Work Prize. His earlier arts and health work The Harmonic Oscillator, which explored the impact of sound in hospital spaces, was also awarded the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Distinctive Australian Work Prize in 2019.
Program
Day 2 : Tuesday 10 September 2024
UNSW Paddington Campus
The mini mentorship participants will visit the Paddington Campus of UNSW to experience aesthetic engagements currently deployed in aged care, in the central desert and at headspace and Youturn QLD to support mental health using arts-based approaches. We will discuss how tthe experiences are made and how they are extending understanding of arts engagements in the arts/health context.
Gail Kenning
Gail Kenning is a Research Fellow at the Big Anxiety Research Centre and fEEL (felt Experience and Empathy Lab) at University of New South Wales. Working with a team of technologists, media artists, psychologists and partner organisations in the mental health and ageing sector, we use ‘bottom’ up approaches to create immersive engagements experiences to support psychosocial wellbeing.
Gail’s background is as an artist and designer (traversing sculpture, textiles, installation and media arts and textile and object design) exhibiting nationally and internationally (Australia, UK, China, Vietnam, South America, US).
Gail engages in psychosocial design pioneering co-design and participatory approaches for older people including those living with advanced dementia working closely with participants and organisations. In 2022-3 she worked with 10 people living with early onset dementia and Group Homes Australia to create To Whom I May Concern a performance with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, challenging the stigma and communicating the experience of living with dementia.
felt Experience & Empathy Lab
The Big Anxiety
To Whom I May Concern
Big Anxiety Research Centre
Day 3 : Wednesday 11 September 2024
St Vincent’s Hospital
The Arts Health program at St Vincent’s aims to provide patients and visitors with comforting spaces and experiences, to help ease anxiety and support mental health while in the hospital environment.
Through the St Vincent’s art collection and temporary exhibition program we show an engaging selection of contemporary Australian artists while our artist projects, arts trolley and events engage directly with staff, patients and visitors in creativity and cultural activity.
Mini mentorship interns will have the opportunity to learn about the different aspects of the St Vincent’s arts health program, including patient centred collaborative design projects to empower consumers in the adult hospital setting. They will partake in a guided creative session with staff and volunteer artists, to gain an understanding of methodologies that can be incorporated in creative activities to meet the needs of diverse patients within the hospital setting.
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Alice McAuliffe
Alice McAuliffe is the Arts Health Manager at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney. With a professional career in arts engagement, curatorial, creative producing and as a practicing artist, Alice has brought a socially engaged lens to the design and implementation of the arts health program at St Vincent’s. Having initiated the program 3.5 years ago she has built the arts health offerings from a collection of contemporary artworks to an award winning, patient centred program that has tangible impact on patients’ wellbeing during their health journey.
Day 4 : Thursday 12 September 2024
Michelle Jersky Program Manager: Arts in Health & Community Development in the Department of Community Child Health, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (Randwick).
Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick has dedicated Aboriginal services which aim to increase access to health care for Aboriginal families and to improve child health outcomes. Central to these services is the Ngala Nanga Mai pARenT Group Program, a multi award-winning program, established in 2009 for parents of Aboriginal children in the La Perouse area. It is run by
the Department of Community Child Health and delivered at the La Perouse Aboriginal Community Health Centre. Ngala Nanga Mai offers a program of arts, cultural and educational sessions that afford opportunities for learning and connecting through culture and creativity.
Participants in the mini-mentorship program will have the opportunity to attend (and participate in) a 3-hour Ngala Nanga Mai workshop session followed by an informal reflective session on their observations and thoughts. There will also be time in this reflective session to make connections between their insights and their own practice.
Michelle Jersky
Michelle Jersky is the Program Manager: Arts in Health & Community Development in the Department of Community Child Health, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (Randwick). She has managed the Ngala Nanga Mai pARenT Group Program in the Department of Community Child Health, since 2009. The program uses art to engage with Aboriginal families in La Perouse and surrounds to build a strong social network, facilitate access to health services and opportunities for strengthening education and cultural wellbeing. Michelle is an artist and has a Master’s Degree in Art History, with a background in arts education and community arts. Michelle is interested in art as meaning making and as a driver for social change.
Participating Artists
Charlotte Salusinszky
I want to use this week with the Cad Factory to think deeply about socially engaged art practices, and how to further integrate these principles into my work with ‘Arts on Prescription’. Within the structure of an allied health team, I’m trying to figure out how to enable artists and participants to have the time and space to genuinely collaborate and creatively engage with their environment and experience. I’m really excited for our week together, to learn from each other, and to see how socially engaged arts/health practices are being applied in different contexts.
Charlotte Salusinszky an actor, writer, and theatre-maker living and working on Gadigal land. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017, where she completed her Honours year in Theatre Practice. Charlotte was a Shopfront Arts Co-op resident artist in 2019/20, where she wrote and performed Little Jokes in Times of War, an autobiographical solo performance about her family’s escape from Hungary. This show had its second season at Kings Cross Theatre in March 2022. In 2021, Charlotte was shortlisted for the Create NSW Theatre (Emerging) Fellowship with Griffin Theatre. This included three months of mentorship and development with Griffin to research her next major work, The Changelings. After further development through residencies at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, and Q Theatre, The Changelings premiered in June 2024 at PACT, supported by Creative Australia.
Charlotte’s interest in storytelling and personal narrative extends to her Lead Artist Practitioner role at HammondCare, where she is currently managing and developing Arts on Prescription, a participatory arts program for older people living with dementia, receiving aged care supports, or in palliative care. Facilitated by professional artists, Arts on Prescription aims to improve participants’ health and wellbeing through creative expression and social connection.
Janet Gibson
I am keen to use this mini-mentorship to explore imaginative ways of expanding my thinking and practice.
Janet Gibson is a theatre and performance studies scholar and creative care practitioner who works with elders and people living with dementia. She is the author of ‘Dementia, Narrative and Performance: Staging Reality, Reimagining Identities’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and has contributed articles to ‘Performance Research’, ‘Research in Drama Education: Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance’ and ‘Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care’ (Routledge, 2022). She is a co-convenor of the Performance, Health and Creative Care (PHCC) Working Group of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) and a founding member of the Sydney Care Lab, which is associated with the Manchester Care Lab, UK. She is a trained actor (Uta Hagen, HB Studios, New York) who performed in ‘Women in Beckett’ at Theater for the New City, New York, under the direction of Moisés Kaufman (of ‘The Laramie Project’). A certified facilitator for TimeSlips, a creative expression program,
Janet works as a part-time drama therapist in a Sydney residential aged care home.
Aesha Henderson
I’m beyond excited to be participating in CAD Factory’s Arts and Health Mini-Mentorship.
I have previously worked with CAD in my Brand X role and admire their approach and practice, I have been particularly interested in their focus on socially engaged practice and feel as though there is room for more support for artist working in this way - so, as a Program Manager, I am on the look out for how I could contribute to this area.
Further to this I have been slowly feeling my way back towards my own creative practice, this opportunity is an exciting research period for me as a step towards something new, unknown, and altruistic which feels exactly aligned with my values as a creative. I’m extremely grateful to be able to spend 5 days with CAD, 2 other artists and our hosts to get into some ideas, converse and listen deeply.
Aesha (She/Her) trained as a visual artist at Sydney College of the Arts with a sculpture / jewellery major. Her theatrical and sometimes mechanised works lead her into puppet making and theatre design where she spent over 15 years working as a maker and designer, lead artist, installer, project manager and sometimes theatre-maker and performer.
Large-scale puppets, puppeteering, performance installation-making and community arts projects became the focus of a diverse practice centred around collaboration. Aesha has created work with Force Majeure, ERTH, Studio A, Tropfest, Cementa, MCA, Sydney Mardi Gras, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Opera House, National Theatre of Parramatta, Vivid, and Redline Productions.
Aesha has spent the past 6 years out of the studio, working as a facilitator in her role as Program Manager at Brand X, while raising a child. Her future aspirations are to combine her practical skills with her capacity to manage logistics in collaborative projects that have capacity to enrich community experiences and support creative experimentation.
This project is supported by The Cad Factory, Arts Health Network NSW/ACT, University of NSW, St Vincent’s Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital (Randwick)
