This time last year I have just completed a report about my time at Engage’s social prescription in Manchester where I was lucky enough to receive a bursary to attend.
I read the report again recently and can see how on a high I was from the conference. Full of enthusiasm for social prescribing. What I’ve learnt about my passion in the last year for social prescribing is it should be fundamentally to everyone in our community.
My interest is the arts on prescription – as I have seen first hand how being creative can rebuild a person from the inside out.
I will give a confession to you when I was in school I would have probably failed my GCSE art because I find it very hard to be told what to do particularly when it comes to being creative. From my experience as an arts ‘facilitator’, you allow people the freedom to experience being creative with know preconceived ideas. If you were to say to a musician in the next hour I want you to create a hit song the likely hood of this happening is relatively low. So why do we put pressure on people to create the perfect image straight off. And as soon as it’s created we validated by saying ‘I’d put that up on my wall’ or ‘lets put it on eBay and see what we get for it?’ I understand this is said with the best of intentions but this really does undermine a persons experience and reason for being creative.
One of my late mentors and friend Osi Osmond explained”when a child draws for the first time they will make marks on the paper and then show their achievements to an adult and the adult will reply with, oh what is that? a house? a tree? and the child will often agree with the adult because of the adults positive praise to what they’ve created. When the child thinks its just a mark on the paper”
I love the way Osi describes this process, as we get older we seem to always have to have an answer for everything or be able to measure and quantify our experiences when life is not like that in general it is often beautifully bitter sweet.
The picture in the post was taken from a google search ‘perfect picture’ and this was the first to appear.
The Drying Room Blog 