CAW members Christina Reading and Jess Moriarty share an update on the recent activity of their CAW-supported project, ‘Creative Recovery’.

Exploring new contexts and challenges for creativity post-Covid.

In June 2021, we hosted an online networking event that drew on existing CAW membership (from health, HE, arts and the city council) and engaged new members (artists, researchers, creative professionals) with a virtual networking event where we gathered and shared methods and strategies that have sustained people’s creativity during the pandemic. Participants were invited to take part in an open speculative, imaginative conversation about what we can learn from each other by sharing these stories of change as life and the creative industries begin to open up once more. The aim of the event was to identify partners and a theme to work collaboratively on that would help us to investigate creative methods for supporting life in a post/mid Covid world. Partners agreed on importance of focusing on themes of wellbeing and aging within Brighton and Hove as there is evidence suggesting that the older population has been disproportionately affected by pandemic.

Next Steps:

• July 2021. Creative brief circulated to attendee’s post event proposing co- constructed funding bid focusing on supporting wellbeing of older people and creativity post Covid;
• November 2021 follow up meeting to discuss a collaborative transdisciplinary funding bid to the AHRC on storytelling and wellbeing in a mid/post-covid world
• November 2021 – final draft of Walking For Creative Recovery (Reading and Moriarty) submitted to publishers (research will inform the project and follow up book, Creative Conversations, with Routledge)
• Feb 2022 Chapter for Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics – abstract submitted and accepted
• Feb 2022 – AHRC bid drafted for peer review

Walking for Creative Recovery is dues out at the end of this year. Our research for the book has informed this seed funded project as it explores how creativity can offer a scaffold that can help people recover from grief, ill health, life change, creative blocks. We have used our findings to inform this project and the bid for the AHRC which will identify the issues facing the aging population in a post/mid Covid world and explore how a variety of creative methods can support their recovery.

– Christina Reading and Jess Moriarty