As I was assisting with planning events to promote our Art in Mind exhibition, I realised that any events we came up with were representative of our experience and interpretation of art and mindfulness, but this may not be representative of the university community that we want to engage with.
To make our events more varied and representative, we decided to run Art in Mind Week, a week of events dedicated to art and mindfulness including a mindful doodling workshop, a mindful art walking tour, a virtual abstract drawing workshop, a mindful run and a mindful creative writing workshop using archival materials as inspiration. I have been particularly involved in assisting in organising the creative writing workshop in collaboration with Lothian Health Services Archive, as I have attended a creative writing workshop with LHSA before and I think using their collections items as creative inspiration is a really unique way to interpret the items that they preserve. We had some excellent attendees to this event, including those who had previously worked in and study topics relating to healthcare, but none of them had heard of the LHSA collections. I was so pleased that we were able to raise awareness for the healthcare collections at the CRC but also the creative potential of many of these items. This was a very small event with only five attendees – unfortunately, despite our efforts in advertising the events on social media, few people showed up to our events during the week, despite a significant number of people signing up to attend. Upon having a conversation with Laura Beattie, the Centre for Research Collections’ Community Outreach Officer, it was clear that this is commonplace when organising heritage events, especially after the coronavirus lockdown. While this was certainly disappointing, it has opened my eyes to the importance of managing expectations when planning events programmes, as well as appreciating the positive and lasting individual impact that more intimate events like the creative writing workshop can have.
During this week, I was also responsible for managing our Wellbeing Stations, which were interactive stands with mindful worksheets, ‘We Have Great Stuff’ CRC colouring in books, art supplies, and a comments pinboard for people to engage with in the Potterow and 40 George Square cafes on campus. These were extremely successful, with over two hundred worksheets and colouring in books taken by visitors to the cafes throughout the week, and lots of lovely and heart-warming messages displayed on our pinboards. This was very rewarding as there was a lot of logistics involved in organising these stations – such as contacting representatives from the University’s Estates Team and the Student’s Association to get permission to host our Wellbeing Stations in one of their venues, as well as designing the aesthetic of the stations and managing the budget to cover the cost of printing and supplies – but the response made it all worth it!
One of our Wellbeing Station pinboards full of messages, highlighting the overwhelming response to this project. Photograph taken by the author.
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