Young carers are a vulnerable group of children who often experience bullying, isolation and mental ill-health. Most of the 700,000 young carers in Britain take on up to 20 hours of caring responsibilities a week. Some care for more than 50.
Create’s creative arts programmes with young carers encourage them to express themselves and develop confidence, self-esteem and supportive relationships with other young carers.
Meet Owen
Owen, 16, cares for his mother, who suffers from depression and chronic pain, as well as his older brother, who is blind. He told us about his experiences taking part in Create filmmaking and music workshops in Bath.
“My mum developed a back problem when I was about 12 years old. It progressed until a doctor told her she couldn’t work anymore and she now suffers from depression and constant pain. But like everything, my home life has its ups and downs. You have to make the best of what you’ve got.
“I like to be creative but I don’t often get creative opportunities like this. I can draw at home but I wouldn’t have the equipment to go out and make a film. And although I had tried filmmaking before, I didn’t have the opportunity to look at different camera shots or experiment with new techniques like I have done here.
“Knowing you’ve created something gives you a nice feeling. I felt a lot of pride when making the soundtrack.”
Owen
“Since we had SouthGate Centre to use as a location, we decided to make a film about a group of friends going out to town. With every team there are moments. Young carers all have something which can cause tension or drama with other people. But I really enjoyed working with such a motivated group of people.
“It was really nice to explore making music because I’ve never had the chance to try it out before. Being in this environment with musicians who are friendly and have a laugh with you really encouraged me to try new things and expand my skills and knowledge. Knowing that you’ve created something gives you a nice feeling. I felt a lot of pride when making the soundtrack; pride and a feeling of accomplishment in saying, ‘Yeah, I did that.’”
CREATE WINS CHILDREN & YOUNG PEOPLE NOW ‘YOUNG CARERS’ AWARD
Last night, a colleague and I attended the Children & Young People Now awards ceremony, an evening that celebrates those working with children, young people and families across the UK. The awards are now recognised as the “Gold Standard” for this work and I’m thrilled that Create won the Young Carers award.
Selected from a shortlist of six incredible organisations, our extensive inspired:arts programme (incorporating art:space and connect:create) was chosen as “the initiative that has done the most to support children, young people or young adults up to 25 who care for a family member or friend with an illness, disability, mental health problem or addiction. This includes support to meet carers’ educational, health, social and emotional needs; helping carers who have previously been unidentified by services; and working with families to reduce inappropriate levels of caring.”
To have been recognised for our work with young carers (one of seven strands of our work across the UK that uses the creative arts to empower the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable children and adults), amongst so many other outstanding organisations and individuals, is a real privilege. Knowing that we were selected not only by a panel of 15 adult judges but also by a panel of 10 young judges – placing young people at the centre of the process – was particularly meaningful.
The event was so much fun – the vibrant tone was set from the start with an incredible performance by The Sick Year Sixes band from Hawthorns Primary School in Wokingham, which received a rapturous standing ovation. They were followed by the effervescent presentational style of Dave Benson Phillips, self-professed statesman of kids’ TV.
Young carers continually put other people’s needs first, taking on extra responsibilities that can lead to anxiety, isolation, missed opportunities and a lack of confidence. 72% report feeling isolated during the summer holidays and 68% feel more stressed or worried during their time off school. We have been committed to young carers since we launched our first project with them in 2007. Last year, we designed and delivered creative projects in 18 geographical locations that empowered 548 young carers, helping them to reduce isolation, build skills and creativity, and enhance wellbeing. As one young person told us:
“It made me feel like I was the one being cared for.”
I am so proud of everyone involved with Create who has enabled us to deliver this work. To our young carers, young carer services, artists, funders, Create staff team and Trustees – this is YOUR award.
To read about our work with young carers, click here.
Holly Khan is a Guyanese British multi-instrumentalist, composer and music facilitator.
Based in London, she is an exceptional emerging artist who was selected for Create’s Nurturing Talent Programme for 2019/20. Holly sat down with us to talk about her journey into music, the power of melody in community facilitation and how Create’s Nurturing Talent programme has developed her practice so far.
We are delighted to have you on our Nurturing Talent programme this year. What inspired you to become a musician?
I’m five years old and squashed in-between my parents at the Royal Albert Hall completely and utterly in awe of my older siblings performing with Harrow Young Musicians. I have a perfect view of the orchestra pit and something catches my attention. The strings. The strings are perfectly synchronised – their bows move simultaneously and I’m mesmerised. As I grew older I was also part of Harrow Young Musicians and had the opportunity to perform such a diverse repertoire of music, from Mahler to Mark-Anthony Turnage, Hans Zimmer to Handel.
I loved being a cog within the machine, contributing to a greater whole. I love the immediacy of orchestral performance, how it transports its listeners back in time or to another place altogether. I had fallen in love with music and the power it had; it was very clear I could never do anything else.
Holly at a young age: “I had fallen in love with music; it was very clear I could never do anything else.”
Your music has a wonderful immediacy to it. The string instruments and the drums create a rhythm that seem to be addressed directly to the heart of the listener. How do you compose your music and achieve this emotional depth?
I believe music infiltrates us in a different way to other artforms. It penetrates right past our conscious thinking and that’s what I’m most interested in, how we listen to, play and feel music.
Strings are the closest instrument to the human voice. I think that’s why we connect so easily to them. As a string player my process always starts with melody. A melody for me is usually inspired by something as simple as watching someone on the bus. Using their rhythmic tendencies, their dynamics, their flair and style and translating it into a melody! As I perform live frequently I use loop pedals and other electronic devices to layer melodic lines over one another, creating a cacophony of sound.
“There is a huge sense of togetherness when creating, a shared sense of ownership and agency and I believe this connection can go on to improve everyday skills.”
Holly Khan
You are half Guyanese and half British. How has this mixture of cultures influenced your practice?
It’s taken me a long time to delve into my Guyanese heritage and my interest in Guyana first sparked through music. As a composer and musician in my 20s, I delved into Guyanese music. It is such a rich fusion of so many different genres and this made perfect sense as Guyana is a big cultural mix. This spoke to me as I am a fusion – a hybrid, a mash of different cultural identities. I think without knowing it for years I was going about things the Guyanese way, being a magpie and collecting things that spoke to me and implementing them into my practice.
I feel like I have a responsibility in my workshops to offer more than the white-British standpoint and to cover lots of experiences sonically. Growing up I was not offered this exploration and it meant I didn’t know any Guyanese songs or South American songs. I want to use music to champion participants’ heritage!
Holly facilitating a workshop
Working with people through your musical practice is an important part of your professional journey. Why do you believe that creativity can help people experiencing disadvantages?
At the beginning of every workshop I ask the participants the same question “What is your relationship to music?” and every time I hear the most incredible stories. Everyone has a relationship to music and to this day I’ve never met anyone who is indifferent to it. Music allows participants to be equal and start on a level playing field. Creating something new that has never been made before forces us to be temporarily outside our comfort zone. There is a huge sense of togetherness when creating, a shared sense of ownership and agency and I believe this connection can go on to improve everyday skills. Being creative is sometimes seen as a privilege but I truly believe everyone has the right to be creative, wherever you come from, whatever your past.
You have been doing a diverse range of work with Create as one of the artists on our Nurturing Talent programme. What has been your experience of the programme so far?
Create’s Nurturing Talent programme has been an incredible opportunity for me. I have learnt from such a vast pool of artists with diverse backgrounds and met a huge number of participants! Being part of the Create family has made me see how beneficial arts are to the community, how powerful it is to collaborate and how shared experiences can be transformational. I will leave this year a more technical musician, a more experienced facilitator and, most importantly, with an absolute dedication to helping the vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society!
You have a packed schedule planned for the rest of the year. What should our readers be looking forward to?
2020 is looking to be a really exciting year! Ticker, a play that I composed the music for, has been confirmed for runs at both Soho Theatre and Northern Stage. East London Cable, who I am collaborating with to develop an immersive piece, shared an extract of the work at Tate Modern in December. The full show will be performed in Paris in March. I am also collaborating with participants to produce an album to mark Fairbeats’ 10 year anniversary! And finally, I am in the very early stages of developing my own social enterprise that looks at combatting loneliness and social isolation through music!
Holly Khan is a workshop facilitator with Angel Shed Theatre Company, Ark Music, Moving Waves, GLUE and Tarka Beats. She has developed a young carers choir with Dreamarts and is in the early stages of developing her own social enterprise that looks at combatting loneliness and social isolation through music.
We are very grateful to The Arts Society through the Patricia Fay Memorial Fund and Charles Lloyd-Jones for supporting the Nurturing Talent programme – this funding is enabling dedicated, talented, emerging artists such as Holly to embed within their artistic practice the skills and experience needed to work within challenging community settings.
Nurturing Talent
Learn more about our programme for emerging artists
I took this image whilst visiting one of our creative arts projects at a hospital in south London. There we work with young people who have a serious mental illness, just one of the many groups of vulnerable children and adults who we work with across the UK.
The day I visited, our professional artist was leading a ceramics workshop with the theme of self-expression. All the young people had self-harming cuts on their wrists, visible signs of an inner pain that they had no other way to express. That’s where Create comes in.
At Snowsfields Adolescent Unit at Maudsley Hospital, our creative:tandem project is designed to relieve stress, allow creative self-expression and give young patients the opportunity to interact socially with one another and the staff who care for them, building a sense of self-worth.
The Voiceless child
The sculpture of the voiceless child, created by one of these young patients, is a powerful reminder of why I started Create and the vital role that the creative arts can play in enhancing wellbeing and giving a voice to those who feel they don’t have one.
I founded the charity 16 years ago at my dining room table with the vision of using the creative arts to help create a fairer, more caring, more inclusive society. Create has since become the UK’s leading charity empowering lives through the creative arts. Our professional artists run around 50 projects a year that empower the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children and adults across the UK.
If you would like to support us directly, or become more involved, please click here.
Create has collaborated with the international law firm Ashurst to tackle the social problem of loneliness among older people.
Age UK states that in the UK there are 3.8 million individuals over the age of 65 who live alone. Nearly half of these people (49%) have confessed that television or pets are their main form of company. Loneliness, a lack of meaningful human interaction, is a feeling that has profound effects on both mental and physical health. In “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review” (2010) researchers have found that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.
Create and Ashurst have designed creative:engagement – the multi-arts project that tackle loneliness among older frail people. With a focus on older people with dementia and mental ill-health, the project builds confidence and facilitates positive social interaction through creativity. The project has been tailor-made to combine Create’s expertise in designing and running creative workshops in community settings with Ashurt’s Corporate Social Responsibility objectives and strategy.
Bringing participants from Maudsley’s SUCAG (Service User Carers Advisor Group) and The Holborn Community Association together with volunteers from Ashurst, the six-weekly workshops at Ashurst’s office provide an opportunity for the two groups of older adults to collaborate on creative projects, building new skills and new relationships.
During the project, the participants work with Create’s professional artists to explore a range of art forms – from sculpture, poetry and painting to photography, ceramics and jewellery-making. This range of art forms enables the participants to develop a variety of connected artistic and technical skills, boosting their self-esteem and creative thinking.
Isabel Porcel-Rojas, SUCAG’s Recovery and Engagement Worker, confesses that “for me the amazing thing is the shared activity with another group, Holborn Community. At the beginning, I wasn’t sure how it was going to be. My group is very friendly, but they got to know each other over a long period of time, so they are very good friends. But now at the end of each Create session, I hear people from my group tell their fellow-participants from Holborn Community, “Goodbye my good friend, see you next time”. They are building up new relationships within this group.”
Being part of creative:engagement from the start, Isabel has been able to observe the impact of the project on the participants. “Madeline has dementia and dyslexia,” Isabel shares, “and when I first asked her to be involved with Create, she told me, “yes but it will be a massive challenge for me. I’ve got dyslexia, I can’t read very complicated documents, I can’t write a lot of things.”
Every single time Madeline arrived at a workshop, she would ask me, “Are they going to put me on the spot? Are they going to ask me to fill something out?”, so she was very private about her dyslexia and about the fact that she couldn’t write and read as well as some other people. The other day, though, in one of the drama sessions she just openly said to everyone, “I wouldn’t be able to do that because I’ve got dyslexia”. The fact that she was feeling confident enough and safe enough in the group to open herself up is very important. She feels a sense of belonging to something and feels safe and protected enough to know that she can just be herself”.
In 2020, our partnership won the Legal Week CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] Innovation (Collaboration) Award. Create is very proud of our collaboration with Ashurst and we look forward to further developing our partnership.
Learn about Ashurst’s global Corporate Responsibility programme on the law firm’s website.
Disorientated and blind-folded, a group of 15 people were individually led into an unknown room. With no visual understanding of where they were in relation to whom and what, they only had their bodily experience of moving through and into a space. This was the beginning of Amy Toner’s distinction-awarded performance c. 2018, in which the artist explored a non-occularcentric spectatorship of dance. By immersing her audience into darkness through blackout eye-masks, Amy prioritised and enhanced the non-visual senses: touch, smell and sound.
One of the spectators potently described his experience: “the rustling sound of slowly scrunching and manipulating a metallic foil sheet made the hairs on my neck stand on end”. In line with the growing intensity of sound, performers began to run around the space, circling in-between, through and behind the audience. In doing so, they created an intense circulation of wind that was physically felt by the audience. Simultaneously, the warm aroma of lemongrass was distilled in the space, adding to the layers of sensory stimulants.
During the exploration of touch, the audience was invited to perform a tactile version of Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam (c. 1508-1512). The blind-folded spectators were guided through a narrated journey (see text at the end of the blog), leading them to the moment of touch within the painting. The spoken word invited audience members to perform the movement physically with their arms, with some spectators raising their arm and index finger. They were each greeted by their ‘creator’ – a performer – who reached out their own index finger to meet the audience member’s. Amy gave her audience the opportunity not to see, but to feel, Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
The choreography of Amy Toner is a quest to understand how people perceive the world. “When considering how we understand performance, there is a large emphasis on the mind. For many, it is through the eyes that the mind makes sense of things, takes in and processes information and therefore eyes have domain over other human senses. But the whole of us lives and exists in the world. The body communicates, listens and understands as a whole entity. I was interested, therefore, in exploring and unpicking other bodily modes of dance spectatorship, modes of spectatorship that move beyond the visual. Some questions I am still researching: Where does the performance exist? In your mind or in your body as a whole?”
In her exploration of movement and spectatorship, Amy Toner joins the league of contemporary dance innovators such as Jerome Bel, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy and Meg Stuart who critiqued and questioned the conventions of dance practice. “Practitioners in the field of contemporary dance have climbed down buildings, stood on stage in stillness, eaten fruit. They have presented this as dance. Although this is not where my own work lies, I have always been inspired by this questioning, especially in terms of the aesthetic of dance and how and where it is presented.”
“During the rehearsal process of [Title], I was interested to see if I could choreograph the show while I was blindfolded: I wanted to create the work through bodily sensation and physical experience alone. For example, a large part of the process was concerned with researching how to translate movement into something that might be physically experienced by the audience members. This was explored by focusing on generating wind through bodily movement – such as turning, jumping, swooping – which could be physically ‘felt.’ Although this was a challenging process, it opened up completely new ways of making work and a new ‘aesthetic’ for my own choreographic practice.”
Already, as a young scholar of dance, Amy’s initiatives have received wide recognition. Since graduating with a first-class degree in Dance from The University of Chichester and gaining a distinction-awarded Masters in Dance from London Contemporary Dance School, she has been invited to share her innovative approach to performance-making by some of the world’s leading cultural institutions. These include the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
At its core, Amy’s practice is deeply concerned with ethics. “An integral part of my practice is concerned with making work based on my perspective on current social issues. Recently my study of choreography has explored our image-saturated society and how it forms our ideas about beauty. I have also explored the issue of loneliness and the current crisis of touch which was inspired by Paula Cocozza’s article in The Guardian, “No hugging: Are we living though a crisis of touch?”. This explores how touch is being “edged out of our lives” and how that has severe effects on our mental health.”
Amy Toner performing at Stedelijk Museum in 2018
“Currently I am making a performance about mental health. The project is centred on the phenomenology of tears and explores the stigma of crying, and in particular, the social mechanism related to the public display of emotional tears. I believe that art should be responding to current social issues and, as a result, spark important conversations.”
Amy’s rejection of the idea that dance is solely a visual medium is much more than an original approach. Amy creates a powerfully inclusive performance, which gives visually impaired audience members the opportunity to engage with the medium of dance. Since [Title], Amy has been developing an inclusive practice in all areas of her work, including teaching, facilitation and choreography. “I am passionate about bringing dance and performance to contexts where people might not have the opportunity to attend a theatre or a show. For instance, I have brought dance work to care homes, nurseries, schools and community centres.”
“Creativity, and particularly dance, has extremely positive effects on people’s physical and mental wellbeing.”
Amy Toner
“I have also continued to research embedding access tools, such as audio description, within the work itself. Typically, audio description is transmitted via a headset, which is experienced by audience members individually. However, I am interested in integrating the method of audio description within the performance itself. This mode of integration does not require headsets. Instead it is embedded through a character on stage or through a venue’s PA system.”
“There are a lot of preconceptions about what it means to be a dancer, for instance, you have to be a certain type of person with a certain type of body. In my facilitation and teaching practice, I show people that this is not the case. I believe that anyone and any body can move, dance, shake, turn, twist and explore. I believe that creativity results in new ways of thinking and being in the world. It brings people together, offers a sense of freedom and is a mode of self-expression and self-awareness. When we create, we access our own thoughts, feelings and imagination.”
“Creativity, and in my experience particularly dance, also has extremely positive effects on both people’s physical and mental wellbeing. Dance is an active and social art form. Dance happens with people together; it is a collective experience. This is why I love working for Create, as it offers diverse and accessible ways for participants to explore their own creativity, express their ideas and, very importantly, have fun! At a time when the arts are being forced out of the educational system in the UK, alongside constant funding cuts, organisation like Create, which are keeping creativity alive, are incredibly important.”
Nurturing Talent
We are extremely proud to have Amy Toner on this year’s Nurturing Talent programme, which was designed to give emerging artists the opportunity to work as supporting artists on Create’s workshops.
Amy has worked particularly closely with young carers, giving them time away from their caring responsibilities, allowing them to have fun, build new skills and friendships, and develop confidence and self-esteem through her specialisation in dance. We look forward to witnessing how Amy’s inclusive dance practice will help to reshape our society’s approach to choreographed performance.
We are very grateful to The Arts Society through the Patricia Fay Memorial Fund and Charles Lloyd-Jones for supporting the Nurturing Talent programme – this funding is enabling dedicated, talented, emerging artists such as Amy to embed within their artistic practice the skills and experience needed to work within challenging community settings.
The moment before meeting someone truly exceptional feels like a freshly tightened violin string waiting to create its first sound. When we walked into Mosimann’s Club to interview Anton Mosimann himself, we were immersed in a symphony of thoughtfully curated details: multi-coloured chairs borrowed hues from the vibrant contemporary paintings hung around the oak-panelled walls, silver animal sculptures exchanged glances from elegantly set tables, and below the high ceiling of this impressively converted 19th century church, waiters in waistcoats confidently attended delighted diners.
At the heart of the place was the rhythmic dance of bright and fresh plates of food – the chef’s signature Cuisine Naturelle. With his complete rejection of oil, butter and alcohol, Anton Mosimann revolutionised British cooking. The notorious TV presenter and gourmand Loyd Grossman potently commented, “The history of food in Britain divides neatly into two periods – before Mosimann and after Mosimann.”
When we met Anton Mosimann in the entrance foyer, his attentive hand-shake and caring eyes reassured us that in this sanctuary of taste we will be able to talk about a world far removed from luxury. After all, it is at Mosimann’s that, for the past 16 years, Create has hosted its annual fundraising Gala.
Once we sat down in a private dining room, one of Britain’s most acclaimed chefs genuinely entreated, “please, call me Anton”. Respect, honesty and hard work are at the heart of Anton’s incredible success story. “At 16 or 17 I got my first apprenticeship, and there I had two head chefs. One was very polite and considerate; the other one was the complete opposite, shouting and screaming all the time, for no reason. There, I learnt how to do things and how not to do things. I said to myself that one day, when I am head chef, I will not allow screaming and shouting. I will keep things in control but calm.”
“You don’t have to be highly educated or hyper-intellectual to be creative, as long as you have the feel for it. It’s about finding the right direction for yourself.”
Anton MosimanN
At 28 years old, Anton became the youngest ever Maitre Chef de Cuisines at London’s Dorchester Hotel. With the thoughtful attitude that he describes above, the young chef led his team to become the first hotel restaurant outside France to achieve a two star rating in the prestigious Michelin Guide.
“If one of my chefs makes a mistake, eight out of 10 times it’s my fault. It means I didn’t show them properly, I didn’t explain it, or I gave them the wrong ingredients. Just go back to the situation and ask ‘why did this happen?’, and be honest, say ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t explain this properly’. Why shout if it’s my own fault? You can only work as a team. Screaming and shouting creates a bad atmosphere. And it gives our profession a bad reputation.”
Anton Mosimann’s impressive career has led him to cooking in 75 countries around the world and winning over 50 Gold Medals in culinary competitions. The favourite chef among the political elite, Anton prepared the celebratory banquet for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. A museum named after him, The Mosimann Collection: a World Culinary Heritage”, has opened in Le Bouveret as part of the prestigious Swiss César Ritz Hospitality School. The educational space displays Anton’s unique collection of more than 6,000 historical cookbooks and menu cards, which is said to be the largest private collection of its kind, covering 500 years of cooking history. Anton’s dedication to culinary innovation has been recognised with the Order of the British Empire.
The culinary maestro’s advice for anyone dreaming of succeeding in a creative career is simple:, “Go the extra mile. The reason why I was able to come to London is because I won the first ever Nestlé Toque d’Or Award. Out of 40 points maximum I got 42 points, two points extra for my written effort. There was a famous chef in Switzerland, Adelrich Furrer, who read my interview in a magazine that covered the competition, my first ever interview. And he loved it. So he wrote to me and asked to meet. It took me six months to have enough courage to go to see him. We had a nice meal, he showed me his culinary books.
Three months later Furrer got a phone call from the Dorchester Hotel in London saying that they were looking for a Head Chef. They told him that they already tried three other candidates but none of them made it. And Furrer told them, “Well Anton Mosimann was here recently”. And so I got the job – all because of that competition. That’s why I always say, go for competitions, go the extra mile.”
“There is always something more to learn”, he adds. “Even once you have achieved a certain status – don’t be afraid to come down again just to learn a bit more about the different areas of your profession. I took backward steps in my career a few times. When I moved to Montreal in Canada, I worked my way up very quickly, became second chef of a huge hotel. Far too young for the position, a wonderful position – my own apartment, swimming pool, everything was there. But I said, “No, I can’t, I’m too young. I have to go back to Europe to learn more about the profession”. So I went back a few steps.
Anton Mosimann receiving his OBE from the Queen
“I went to work in the Gstaad Palace hotel. Knowing close to nothing about pastry, I decided to go back to the bottom and learn it from scratch. I started there as a Commis de Pâtisserie – an apprentice pastry maker. People thought I was mad but it was the best decision ever. When I went to the Dorchester a year later, I had 132 chefs in the kitchen and 32 pastry chefs. These pastry chefs were amazed to meet a new head chef who understood every aspect of the business”.
Creativity and fearless innovation are the driving force behind Anton’s passion for his work. “You give me a piece of leek and I think what can I do with it? You don’t have to be highly educated or hyper-intellectual to be creative, as long as you have the feel for it. It’s about finding the right direction for yourself. I wrote my book The Art of Anton Mosimann 30 years ago. Here, I first chose the plate and then created the food for it. Again, that’s creativity, being different. Black and white plates with colours on top. It’s simple but it’s creative.”
When it comes to charity, Anton commits to the causes he believes in with same “going the extra mile” attitude. “Making a difference is very much up to us”, he says about people with the ability and the privilege to help others. “It’s about taking the time, which I learnt from my parents. At Christmas, our family’s restaurant always had a party for the people who were lonely, because Christmas can be a very difficult time for lots of people.”
This year Create’s annual Gala Dinner, hosted by Anton Mosimann, was focused on raising funds towards working with participants suffering from mental ill-health. Read our blog post with Dr. Richard Corrigall, a consultant adolescent psychiatrist at Snowsfields Adolescent Unit, who comments on the relationship between mental health and creativity here.
In his philanthropic work, Anton concentrates on sharing his culinary and business experience with young talent. “I really loved our week-long project with Create a few years ago, in which we taught young carers from London how to develop a restaurant menu. We took them to Borough Market to get inspiration, and then at the end of the week they created a beautiful restaurant experience for 12 guests at the Mosimann Academy, serving a meal that had designed and cooked themselves. That was really fun!”
“Over the many years that we have worked with young people, we have had some very inspirational encounters. I remember two boys who were particularly motivated. They spent more time in the kitchen than they had to and were extremely eager to learn more.
In turn, we took the time with them – we went to the market together, explained how the food business works, showed them different kitchens. One of them had never held a knife in his hands before working with us! Today, they both have their own catering businesses.”
Last month Anton went to Burma to give a talk at a school for deaf children. In a fortnight, he is off to Scotland to teach at a cookery school for disadvantaged children in Glasgow. His tireless ambition to create a positive experience through cooking is a lesson that we can all take on board. Whether delighting royal guests at his iconic club in Belgravia or travelling the globe to empower others, Anton is a true embodiment of his own words:
“Going the extra mile is what makes the difference between being good and being excellent”.
We are very grateful to Anton Mosimann for his continuous support of our cause. Mosimann’s have hosted Create’s fundraising Gala Dinner annually for the past 16 years, helping the charity to raise over £750,000. Discover Anton’s exquisite approach to food on his private dining club’s website.
CREATE’S 16TH ANNUAL GALA DINNER AT MOSIMANN’S RAISES £54,356
On Thursday 17 October 2019, Anton Mosimann OBE hosted our 16th anniversary Gala Dinner at Mosimann’s Club in Belgravia.
During the evening, guests enjoyed a Champagne reception followed by a delicious six-course meal. Colin Sheaf, Chairman of Bonhams UK, and his wife Annie conducted our auction. With the kindness generosity of our guests this year, we were able to to raise an incredible £54,356 during the evening.
These funds will enable us to empower more disadvantaged and vulnerable people across the UK through our creative projects. A particular focus of the evening was raising funds towards working with participants suffering from mental ill-health. In our recent blog post, Dr. Richard Corrigall, a consultant adolescent psychiatrist at Snowsfields Adolescent Unit, potently comments on the relationship of creativity and mental health. “Imagine you’ve got a mental illness, you’ve been in hospital – you can be very self-destructive or self-critical. So we try to restore some kind of faith and self-esteem, and I think creative things can be really good at that. To recover is therefore to restore yourself…”
We are extremely grateful to everyone who generously supported our vital cause during the Gala Dinner.
MENTAL HEALTH AND CREATIVITY: DR RICHARD CORRIGALL’S PERSPECTIVE
Dr Richard Corrigall, a consultant adolescent psychiatrist at Snowsfields, believes that creativity can have tangible benefits on mental health.
“Mental health problems is thinking about yourself as being difficult or troublesome. To recover is therefore to restore yourself, and helping someone do that can feel enormously satisfying as a doctor, particularly when working with teenagers: they’re at the beginning of their lives and are beginning to become independent, new people.”
A painting made by a participant on our creative:tandem project
With self-esteem in mind, Create devised the creative:tandem project for patients at Snowsfields Adolescent Unit at Maudsley Hospital in South London. The institution is an open unit offering mental health care for adolescents with a serious mental illness who require hospital admission. Run by Create’s professional artists, creative:tandem is a multi-art form project, which focuses on building confidence.
“Our patients at Snowsfields are people for whom outpatient care is not safe or sustainable. Mostly it’s crisis admissions; a big chunk tends to be self-harming of a serious nature, suicide-related. Typically patients come in with emotionally unstable personality disorder, as in difficult mood changes and complicated social pressures. Those with psychosis and psychotic-related illnesses are another big group.
“With any mental health care, the key elements are biological, psychological and social. They’re all extremely important, it’s not that there’s just one area you need to be focusing on. Variety is what I’ve always been keen on. It’s very important to have the medical stuff and the diagnosis and prescribing, but that should fit into the broader objective of helping people to restore their lives in a rich way. It’s not just saying “These symptoms have gone away” – they’ve restored their real lives.
“Imagine you’ve got a mental illness, you’ve been in hospital – you can be very self-destructive or self-critical. So we try to restore some kind of faith and self-esteem, and I think creative things can be really good at that.”
Dr Richard Corrigall
A sculpture made by a creative:tandem participant at Snowsfields
“Sometimes we have to make strong recommendations about medications which some patients can be quite resistant to. But I think having that dialogue can be more positive if you’ve given a young person the opportunity to express their feelings in different ways. You’ve demonstrated that you have real respect for them as a complicated individual, rather than just being a doctor saying: “You’ve got to do this”.
“Over the years, I’ve been prone to depressive episodes myself. In 2013 it got really severe, to the point of breakdown. When I recovered and felt optimism and interest again, after going through loads of time being negative and self-critical, I went to an art talk. One artist who was talked about was a person who’d been a mental health service user herself, and when I saw some of her art I was hugely inspired. It was related to her mental health crisis and stuff she’d been through. I really related to her art; I could understand what it meant. And then that gave me the idea of suddenly playing around with art.
“Since then I’ve been more and more interested in art. It does feel a very reassuring, healthy thing. Even the difficult things I’d been through became part of what helped with the creative expression. Which is another fascinating thing: mental health can obviously be unpleasant and disturbing, but it can also be enriching. When you see other people’s work, sometimes the things they’re able to communicate can be astonishing.
“Art can be drawing contradictory things together, which you could say is what consciousness is like. The world around us is incredibly complicated. All of our thinking is a bit of an oversimplification because it has to be. Sometimes creative things get to the depth and can connect with something that seems quite profound. Having said that, people can also use it in a very trivial way. It’s not right or wrong, it doesn’t have to have profound meaning necessarily. Sometimes it can be just doodling, it can just be relaxing. It inspires social functioning, how to get on with and relate to other people, problem solving.
“One young patient here had anorexia. She was clearly very talented at art and liked doing it, but she was very critical of her drawing and wanted it to be perfect. That illustrated the perfectionism that can relate to anorexia. We talked about how perfectionism can affect people and her trying a different approach, so she tried an impulsive, slightly random style of making art. That wasn’t her typical style, but it related in a metaphorical way to some of her psychological issues. She began using her detailed skills creatively but not getting overwhelmed by it, just in a nice straightforward way, and she was really quite thrilled by it. She actually went on to get a degree in art.”
To learn more about the work of Snowfields Adolescent Unit, read this blog or visit their website.
Every day over eight million people wake up to a new day in London. For some it is the beginning of another choiceless, silent battle with loneliness.
Age UK states that more than two million people in England over the age of 75 live alone, more than a million of whom say they go for over a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member. The NHS website states that “it’s shockingly easy to be left feeling alone and vulnerable, which can lead to depression and a serious decline in physical health and wellbeing”.
Barry (not his real name) is one of the thousands of older frail people who have participated in Create’s multi-artform projects designed to tackle loneliness among older people.
Meet Barry
“I live alone in a bungalow and rather than spending all day watching television and reading newspapers, I like to get out for a change of scenery and also for the opportunity to socialise. The art course gives me a chance to do something that is of interest to me.
“My wife was quite a talented amateur artist. I personally never ever painted at all, but when she passed away she left quite a bit of bone china that she hasn’t got round to painting, and obviously painting materials. So I thought if I can come on this group, and learn how to paint, and then hopefully I can try to utilise the ceramics that she has left behind. So this is my first attempt, and I hope it’s doesn’t look to horrendous.”
In Create’s projects for older frail people, participants work with professional artists to explore a range of art forms – from ceramics and photography to poetry and jewellery-making. This range of art forms enables the participants to develop a variety of connected artistic and technical skills, boosting their self-esteem and creative thinking.
Musician and Create artist Graham Rix reflects on one of his Create workshops with older people – “We explored many ideas that came directly from the group, both from their actual life experiences and from their imagined song narratives to see if there were themes and specific content we could work into our songs. To get the ideas flowing we’d sing songs they already knew and then talk about the story of that song as a stepping stone to going on and talking about our own experiences and ideas for a song. We wrote any of our ideas down so we could see them, use them and remember them. We also considered looking at photos of “Magic Moments” in life (like a new born baby, V.E day parade, calf being bottle fed etc) and gathering responses to these.
“There was so much visible pride and confidence on display come the final performance. From full throttle singing to impromptu dancing, it was clear that for many this was a chance to enjoy the occasion and what we had created. I liked that there was space, given that we were singing as a group, for those that were sometimes confused – I saw them sitting back sometimes but then there were also times when they would take part whole heartedly.”
