Past Projects
The Wall - detail (Photo: Catherine Acin)
The Wall project evolved serendipitously from Arts Access Art Classes. Guided by professional artist Michael Knight, AAAC participants created a massive mural on the courtyard wall of Casey Hospital’s mental health ward. The project was documented by filmmaker Jonathon Chong, and will be screened on ABC TV and The Australia Network.
A project that challenged participants’ creativity and imagination, Reuse, Reconstruct and Regenerate comprised a series of full day workshops in recycle object sculpture. Entailing trips to recycling centres and op shops, the workshops produced many fantastic and surprising sculptures, with support staff reporting that participants were engaged to the point of not taking cigarette breaks for many hours and staying focused on their tasks in a way never previously achieved!
Urban Spring was a mentoring project for three participants from the Casey/ Cardinia region who had shown a long term commitment to their art making. Over three months the group met informally, selecting work from their folio and creating new work building on themes they had been exploring. The outcome was a month-long exhibition at contemporary art gallery Libra Dogma Gallery, giving these artists an opportunity to exhibit their work in a professional context.
Artist Di Lockwood worked with participants over a seven-week period to create large-scale acrylic paintings in preparation for a major group exhibition Art to Live By at Cardinia Cultural Centre as part of Mental Health Week 2009. For the past three years the participants have focused on creative processes that require less refined motor skills, like photography, linocut and lantern making. The progression to drawing and painting has been a significant step in their creative development, allowing them freedom, confidence and a heightened maturity in their work.
“I’ve experienced depression for a long time and sometimes keeping the distress contained does not allow other things to enter or leave my head. Art allows me to give voice to those things that words often fail, allows other ideas to enter and reconnects me with those parts of myself I thought I’d lost.”
Julie, ‘Art to Live By’ participant
In Cut a Line and Mark Your Mark all participants in the AAAC workshops are in recovery from serious mental illness, and are clients of mental health and social rehabilitation organisations. The focus and delivery of the workshops is dependent on the culture of the organisations and the creative interests of participants. Each organisation is unique in the way it delivers services to its clients and Arts Access Victoria engages closely with these organisations to enhance existing services by providing access to workshop facilitators and quality materials to deliver superior exhibition, publishing and performance outcomes.
The Arts Access Victoria / ERMHA partnership sought to consolidate the Pakenham and Berwick classes by running shorter workshops over a longer period of time with the same artists. This allowed for a consistent exploration of form in order to produce work for a major exhibition as part of Mental Health Week at the Cardinia Cultural Centre. Collaborating artists Max Kaluza and Gary Solomon facilitated workshops in painting, linocut and printmaking, to produce a wide range of work for exhibition.
