On 18th October 2024 at the Bristol Beacon, creativeShift, Culture West and University of Bristol co-produced Creative Health in Action (CHIA), an event celebrating, showcasing and exploring how the arts and creativity can have a positive impact on health and wellbeing. We were delighted to hear from Jess Baum, Art Psychotherapist and Wellbeing Arts Facilitator, who led a creative workshop at the event, using our INgredients iN ArTs in hEalth (INNATE) framework.
In this blog, we share how Jess creatively applied the INNATE framework to help facilitate a workshop, inviting participants to reflect on the question central to the framework: What are the active ingredients needed for people to have positive creative health experiences?
INgredients iN ArTs in hEalth (INNATE) framework
The INNATE framework details what it is about arts engagement that may lead to effects on health and wellbeing – it includes 139 potential active ingredients within three overarching categories:
- Project components relate directly to the content of the arts activity itself, intrinsic to what the activity is.
- The people category denotes how people interact through engagement with the activity and who is involved in this interaction, including activity facilitation.
- Contexts relates to the activity setting, such as place(s), things, and surroundings.
Ingredients may interconnect or feed into one another to prompt mechanisms and may not be experienced as distinct by participants. The INNATE framework itself does not assert which active ingredients are ‘right’ in any given context, and it is up to the person applying the Framework to reflexively work with the tool to explore which ingredients are important to health.
Jess Baum and creativeShift: What are the active ingredients needed for people to have positive creative health experiences?
At the Creative Health in Action (CHIA) event, Jess led a creative workshop in collaboration with creativeShift, inviting participants to ‘play with clay and have their say’ about what they think are the active ingredients needed for people to have a positive creative health experience.
For the workshop, Jess drew out the ‘active ingredients’ from the INNATE framework, mapped them on a large poster and glued it onto a large obelisk covered in fairy lights, with a speaker playing relaxing music inside. This object was placed in the centre of a round table around which the participants would sit and creatively respond through clay. Jess intentionally designed the activity to engage people with the INNATE framework in a joyful, accessible and creative way, as is ordinary for her creative health sessions.
Over 30 people from various backgrounds – the public, service users, facilitators, link workers, health professionals, including arts psychotherapists and mental health practitioners, arts and museums professionals – participated in the activity. Many of them made object(s) out of clay, interacting with curiosity with the INNATE framework, the art materials, tools and with each other.
