First Steps

Since the lockdown started the artist team has been busy developing ways of continuing to keep in touch and work creatively with the artist/makers. As always, we are taking a person-centred approach and so we have been exploring different ways to do this for each participant whether by telephone, post, email or weekly Zoom sessions. We are aware this is a complex and challenging time for parents and carers, so we are designing the sessions to be sensitive to this and with everybody’s needs in mind. This will be an evolving process – we will continue to change things in response to feedback from the artist/makers so that we find what works best for them as individuals as well as enabling us all to stay connected as a group.

We took our first steps as an artist team through meeting on Zoom, where we talked about what we could offer the artist/makers we work with. For some, communication is straightforward, but for others it is extremely complex. Some live at home with family, others in different care settings. For some, contact will be reassuring but others may find it confusing. Some have easy access to computers others can only make contact via phone or post. We knew we needed to find our way with each participant in turn. To support this, we decided each artist would focus on one or two participants in particular to develop the right approach for them. We’ll share more of this thinking in future posts.