Artinfusion

How founding our CIC connected us to ourselves, others and art.

Spring is here, although you wouldn’t always know it with the recent cold snaps and hailstorms… Maybe it is because I am getting older; maybe it is because of my great yoga teacher, who is very in touch with moon cycles, but I am starting notice the changing of seasons more and more, and the opportunity these changing seasons offer to slow down for a moment; to notice and reflect on what has been and what is coming.

This new Spring season is an especially exciting one for me, as – together with my amazing colleagues, art therapist Zelda Elliott and Mindfulness and Compassion Coach Buse Yildirim – I am officially launching our new social enterprise Artinfusion.

I have never been one for a business plan. A therapist once told me that life is not a pre-designed path, but a web of choices and opportunities, and that sometimes we need to follow a fork in the road and just see where it lands. It helped me make sense of my episodes of depression, which often resulted from life not going the way I had envisaged; the way I told myself that it “should” go. But it is also something I follow in my work. When asked what my five-year plan is I usually draw a blank, but what I can say instead is that I lay out and categorise the different paths that my career could take (usually through my Inbox folders, which for me are the best organisational tool). But after I have done that, I try and follow the flow, and see where my excitement and intuition takes me. And so it was with Artinfusion.

I had been leading some voluntary Zoom sessions for ELATT, a community college in Hackney, which I was connected to through a client of my art tours. Again, I didn’t have a preconceived plan, just a wish and a passion to share great art with others. ELATT’s demographic consists of a large percentage of immigrants and refugees, and my online Zoom sessions and a couple of museum visits were one of the most moving sessions I have led. I especially remember one titled “The Female Gaze”, which had some women in tears; they recognised their own struggles in artworks by Shirin Neshat, Hayv Kahraman, Marina Abramovich, and Alberta Whittle. I also met Zelda and Buse, who were both part of ELATT’s Wellbeing Team, running it on very low cost but with great love and commitment. Something clicked.

In January 2023 we tentatively started on our journey together – three professionals with a love of art and desire to share that love with others, but also three women who intuitively felt a connection to each other. It didn’t come without its obstacles… getting used to each other’s different temperaments and, as a result, differing ways of doing things, having no office space, and trying to do something none of had done before - setting up a creative wellbeing company. It took an entire year to formulate our mission, to the point were the word became forbidden, so many times had we revised it. (The final version, for those interested: Artinfusion is a creative health social enterprise, fusing mindfulness, looking at art, and art therapy. We support teams and community groups by slowing down with the art of today to sustain mental health and reduce the risk of burnout).

But the hard work paid off, and great things started happening. One of my best friends took the plunge and commissioned us for not one, but two workshops with her team at London Business School. The Photographer’s Gallery generously gave us free use of a large, airy studio, where we held a session on ‘Grief through Art’, using the series The Garden by Sian Davey. We recruited a volunteer, who, like Buse and myself had come to the UK from another country, but in her case as a refugee (fitting with one of the core audiences Artinfusion is trying to reach: migrants).

And we started practicing what we preached. We noticed how good it was for us as individuals, but also as a team, to slow down with art, and started incorporating a 20-minute mindful art experience as the start of all our meetings (following the latest research that 20 minutes of engaging with art has a tangible effect on the brain). We do a breathing or movement exercise (led by Buse), we make a drawing and reflect on it together (led by Zelda), or we discuss at an artwork on view in London (led by me). We always note how our mood lifts and our enthusiasm grows after these very manageable, but very rewarding mindful moments.

Personally, something started to happen that surprised me: I really started to enjoy making something with my hands. People often ask me whether I do any art myself, to which I usually reply: “I never make anything, I just talk about great art by others!”, but I will always remember the mini-session where Zelda asked us to draw something after our new volunteer shared her story of coming to the UK, and I found myself reflecting on my own journey, drawing a woman in pain, and bursting into tears. It not made us bond; it also meant that by sharing something painful, I felt lighter.

Beauty - finding the beautiful in everyday life as well as well as in iconic artworks – has always been one of the drives behind my love of art, but another, equally important inspiration started to develop: that art can teach us how to live. I realised that the reason I specialise in contemporary art is not just that I like the new – incredible new materials, exciting new ways of curating – but that contemporary art is made by artists who are alive in the current moment. Contemporary art can show us common struggles, as I experienced in my ELATT sessions, and it can can do something more difficult to pin down: it can hold ambiguity and complexity, something often missing in our polarised 21st century world.

Creative health is one of the most important developments in medical care of the past ten years. I recently attended a conference at St Barts Hospital, The Muse in Medicine, and wrote down what Louise Younie, GP and Professor of Medical Education at Queen Mary University, said. “Art is not just expression, but also meaning-making. Exploring lived experience through the arts extends connection, with the self and the other.” That is what we aim to do at Artinfusion.

So it is with great pleasure that I share Artinfusion’s Spring Membership Programme, running from 7th May until 23rd July (please find a link with option to sign up here). For only £75 per person you will have access to 12 sessions; 9 hours online, 3 in-person museum visits and a creative workshop at our new office co-working space, at the Camden Collective. Why this amazing price? It is a pilot; we are hoping to gather invaluable feedback from participants, which is essential when we apply for funding. The notion of a pilot fits. If art has told us one thing, it is to keep an open mind, experiment and try. I hope you will join us in the journey.