South London Gallery’s Creative Families is a series of artist-led projects which explores the relationship of parenting to well-being.
Through working directly with local families, it aims to promote well-being as well as critically explore some of the ideas that shape notions of contemporary parenting through the medium of socially-engaged art practice. It is an early-intervention programme developed in partnership with Southwark’s Parental Mental Health Team and four local Children’s Centres: Grove, Crawford, Ann Bernadt and 1st Place, to work with parents experiencing mental health difficulties, and their children.
The pilot programme ran from 2013 to 2014 and was funded by Guys and St Thomas Charity. Research findings from this first phase of the project were made public through an innovative partnership between the Centre for Parent and Child Support (South London and Maudsley), and Goldsmiths University’s Centre for Urban Community Research, through annual conferences and reports.
For Creative Families 2017 Albert Potrony’s project set to explore the value of play and placed participants (both children and adults) as experts at the centre of our communal research. Through playful scenarios and activities the group shared their experiences of play at home and in the public space and developed collectively a Play Toolkit to be shared among friends and other families.
Links:
Creative Families
Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research