Selfhood: Creative Explorations of Art, Health and Lived Experience

Our selfhood – our identity, our sense of who we are – is intimately connected to our health and mental and physical wellbeing. Throughout our lives we have to navigate how changes in health impact our individual and collective identities. This event presents creative practice that seeks to give voice, motion and mage to the lived experience of mental health and how this impacts on selfhood.

The event will present the work of Elaine Harvey (Dancing with Dementia), Christina Kolaiti (Inertia, The Teddy Bear Cabinet) and Tracy Willits (Pip Pop and a Pandemic) and incorporates screenings, exhibition, audio performances as well as discussion and debate.

Elaine Harvey – Dancing with Dementia

Elaine Harvey is a dance artist whose current research uses dance and participatory practice to explore embodied experiences of living with dementia. Her work examines how the body might be better incorporated into the discussion around diverse conceptions of the self and lived experiences of dementia, and seeks to problematize the implicit assumption that selfhood depends exclusively on cognition. Elaine is a senior lecturer in dance and performance at York St John University.

Dancing with Dementia is an audio documentary which aims to animate and reimagine the metaphorical discourse around dementia by asking people affected by the condition to conceive of it as a dance.

Christina Kolaiti – Inertia, The Teddy Bear Cabinet

Christina Kolaiti is a senior lecturer in photography at York St John University. She is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary research collaborations with healthcare institutions have been recognised 'for an outstanding contribution to the art and science of photography' (rps.org). Her research activities have positioned the narrative properties of photographic portraiture as a form of reflective practice, within a diverse range of scientific and pedagogical contexts.

Christina's current research challenges the conflicting landscape of early motherhood, as this is conveyed through social prescriptions, which interpret the body as a metaphor for self-worth and aim at controlling the mother-infant physicality. She will be presenting her project Inertia, which explores the transitional identity of the new mother during the early days of post-birth experience, through a series of visual narratives, artefacts, and collaborative poetry.

The Teddy Bear Cabinet [Exhibition] Creative Centre Atrium, 4th-7th July 2022

Tracy Willits

Filmmaker Tracy Willits is a senior lecturer in media production with a background in health documentaries for broadcast television. Her current research project Pip Pop and a Pandemic was filmed over an 18-month period and aims to give a voice to people with schizophrenia and their carers. Filmed against the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic this documentary exposes the consequences of cuts to mental health services and the inadequacies of the benefits system. Tracy describes the project as a real-life ‘I Daniel Blake’ with deeply honest contributions from vulnerable people for whom everyday life can be a struggle.

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