Minds Do Matter exhibition celebrates mental health through art (27/9/24)

QVMAG has opened its annual Minds Do Matter exhibition to celebrate the relationship between mental health and art. Video by Aaron Smith (27/9/24)

Transcript

00:00Minds Do Matter is an exhibition that we do on an annual basis in collaboration with Rant Arts.

00:05It's very important for QVMAG to be a part of that process because the exhibition is by the

00:11community for the community and it just demonstrates or shows how important art is

00:19for your mental health, whether you're actually a practitioner, whether you're a professional,

00:26whether you're just sitting in your back garden, you know, doodling, drawing, that actually helps

00:32with your mental health. This exhibition's growing every year and so when Karen told me that it was

00:38225 participants I nearly fell off my chair because I'm thinking how are we going to fit 225 artworks

00:44but there's 115 artworks done by 225 people and it just shows again how important art is

00:52to help people with mental health. Living with mental health, being of mental health, I think

01:00it's a really important concept and being an arts worker who is also trying to be an artist it's

01:06really important to have these types of exhibitions to keep us accountable for creating our work and

01:12continuing to produce. My work is called Heat, Fear and Enthusiasm and it is kind of, it's amusing on

01:20the remembered landscape around us but it was also made in the kind of height of summer and

01:28it's an interesting conversation around how having a nice beer in the sun is great

01:33for our joy and our shining mental health but it also can be a negative to our mental health too

01:38so it's a bit of a contradiction. As an artist, producing is really therapeutic, it's really

01:44mindful and for me it's quite routine, it's really structured, I try and paint for two hours a day

01:50and again having that accountability and that time to just sit down and

01:54tune out from the world and focus on painting and kind of, as you'll see, my piece is abstract so

02:01a lot of my mark making is quite intuitive and in response to kind of what's going on

02:05internally so it's a way of processing what's going on around me.