We were very pleased to be a part of The Holburne Museums’ ‘changing life through art’ symposium last week. It was a timely event showcasing the impressive work of their Pathways to Wellbeing initiative. A significant project within this initiative is Fresh Art@, a collaboration between Creativity Works, The Holburne Museum, No. 1 Royal Crescent, The American Museum and Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Trust (AWP). As you can imagine, with so many partners this is a complex project to deliver, however, as discussed at the symposium, the benefits of partnership working far out way the knotty negotiations carried out between stakeholders. Fresh Art@ has been running for a number of years now and the work produced adorns and enlivens the walls of numerous NHS wards and buildings creating affirmative, pleasing and creative spaces.

This year, as in previous years, The Museums provide their space, artefacts and exhibitions as stimuli, and our current Fresh Art@ worker, Tash, alongside professional artist Barbara Disney and AWP staff, facilitate a group of participants to create work that is placed in clinical environments and also an exhibition as part of Fringe Arts Bath. This year’s exhibition will be taking place at The Roper Gallery, Bath Artist Studios in the last two weeks of May.

We are all exceptionally proud of this project as it exemplifies the sheer hard work undertaken by our own staff, and our partners, to achieve our shared vision of changing peoples lives through art and creativity. Fresh Art@ does exactly that and I believe it should both be applauded and funded in equal measure.

As part of the exhibition in May, we will be holding a co|Create session for artists and other third sector and statutory organisations showcasing the work and disseminating the creative and partnership practice involved in making the project such a huge success. Do look out for this when we advertise the Creative Inspiration strand of our co|Create artist support and development programme in the very near future.

Lately, I have been writing about our two other co|Create strands; Creative Resilience and Enterprise Works. Last week we completed the second of our Creative Resilience pilots for a group of social entrepreneurs in Bristol. The feedback from this day was extremely positive and we will be doing another session for artists very soon. Similarly, we recently completed our first Enterprise Works pilot in collaboration with The University of Bath Innovation Centre. I have to say, this pilot went even better that we anticipated and we received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Do see inside this newsletter for articles written by two of the participants about their experience of the programme and look out for our second iteration of this venture coming soon.