Nicola Simpson: NCRM Impact Prize entry
The title of this application was Creating Confidence: The Art of Co-creation in Secure and Forensic Mental Health Spaces. It was submitted by Dr Nicola Simpson of Norwich University of the Arts.
Summary of NCRM participation
I attended the Using Creative Research Methods – Online Course, 2023, with Dr Helen Kara. This course ran weekly from 4 January 2023-15 February 2023. My application for a NCRM bursary to attend this course was successful. The sessions included: creative methods and ethics in a pandemic; enhanced mobile interviews; using comics and animation in research; using video in research; poetic inquiry and metaphor collection and analysis.
Impact achieved
In the six months since I completed the course, it has had a clear impact on my research progress and success in funding applications. The last two sessions of Dr Kara’s course on using creative research methods, focusing on poetic inquiry and metaphor collection and analysis, resonated with me immediately and I was able to implement what I learned in these two sessions in the research project I was then working on with the arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms, South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust and a lived experience team recruited from Springfield Hospital in Tooting. Dr Kara in her general instructions to the group and her specific personal advice, gave me the confidence to utilise my prior knowledge and academic expertise in experimental poetry to reconsider how we could analyse and disseminate the data generated from this project. I designed the Hope in places that you haven’t been Kinetic Poetry Box, and it was selected to be exhibited at the Social Research Association annual conference exhibition Please Do Touch, in June 2023. This kinetic poetry game is made from a series of picture and word cards selected from the co-produced data collated in the project and created by the lived experience experts in various collage, photovoice and arts-based activities that have been implemented to capture impact narrative. The aim of the game is to write a kinetic poem. To play, the cards are shuffled and dealt amongst the players, ideally 4-6 people participate. On receiving their cards, each player can assemble their cards into a sequence, however, when it comes to playing, each player in turn can only place one card down at a time. This means that no one player manages to compose a complete poetic line. Each player must continually adapt their prepared or imagined sequences to the changes that occur during each round. This game therefore facilitates a shared compositional practice that builds on associative and material metaphorical thinking. New connections, intentional or stochastic are made between the data as each player consolidates or disrupts the visual, linguistic and imagistic narrative in unexpected combinations. This is a way of disseminating the creative and procedural meaning-making that has happened in the project.
The feedback from the Social Research Association conference about this output, gave me a new-found confidence to consider how these creative research outputs could be disseminated on the same platforms as work by renowned national and international artists, and reach the same commercial and institutional audiences. Therefore, in consultation with project partner Hospital Rooms, the Kinetic Poetry Box was then adapted, in discussions with the lived experience team, and a selection of the cards were magnetised for a commissioned collaboration with the artist Abbas Zahir, and exhibited at Hospital Rooms Holding Space, 17 August-12 September 2023, Hauser & Worth Gallery, London. This multisensory and interactive exhibition filled the gallery with immersive commissions, mixed media artworks and site-specific installations from a range of artist such as Alvin Kofi, Katherine Lazenby, Richard Wentworth, Giles Deacon and Sutapa Biswas.
Dr Kara’s course has given me the tools to be very ambitious about exploring the full potential of using creative, arts and material research methods in coproduction with service users in inpatient, secure and forensic mental health hospitals and how these methods can be part of not just data collation and analysis, but also dissemination and public engagement.
The learning also influenced my decision to prioritise using creative research and evaluation methods in the research design in a collaborative research project between Norwich University of the Arts, Hospital Rooms and Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust NHS (NSFT NHS), for the newly purpose-built mental health hospital, the Rivers Centre at Hellesdon Hospital, Norwich. The project began in March 2023 and is a two-year project to run artists workshops, 'a season of creativity' and install 15 artworks into the hospital. I am working closely with recruited lived experience experts and current service-users to document the impact of this project over a two year period and are employing a variety of creative research methods to do this, but also have designed creative arts research methods into each stage of the project, most importantly developing strategies to transfer the knowledge and skills I have acquired to these participants so that they become co-researchers on the project, adept at using a wide range of creative arts research methods.
The course with NCRM, also inspired me to apply for a small award for the Being Human Festival 2023 to showcase and engage new and marginalised audiences with creative arts research methods. The application for a grant was successful, and my proposal for ‘Hellesdon Hospital and the art of recovery’, a pop-up exhibition and four creative artist workshops for service-users, carers and families and NSFT NHS staff will happen as part of the festival 9th -18th November 2023. This exhibition invites the audience, in the words of one expert by experience, to get “curious about the story” of mental healthcare over the last three centuries and explore this through artefacts, documents and testimonies in a series of creative art workshops. In coproducing the exhibition, current staff and service users in recovery will gain knowledge about collaborative curatorial methodologies, creative arts research methods, and how the construction of an exhibition can act as a platform for research, discovery, debate, a reconsideration of personal identity and a way to frame their own relationship to objects of the past. Through participation in workshops, knowledge transfer and societal impact will be achieved as individuals will overcome barriers to accessing the arts, learn new skills and encounter the history of Hellesdon Hospital through tactile, experiential learning. It is hoped they will see themselves differently, tell their own story creatively and stretch their capabilities. This will also be an opportunity for my creative arts research to reach new marginalised audiences, such as service-users’ carers and their families and NHS staff.
As highlighted above, there has been immediate demonstratable impacts from the course I took with Dr Kara in just a few months and I am confident there will be future organisational impact on both the charity Hospital Rooms and the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Trust, on the benefits of using creative methods in co-produced research and evaluation projects with service-users. There is also the potential for international reach and significance, as I have had recent conversations with the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, New York University and the World Health Organisation about using coproduction and creative research methodologies to research and evaluate arts interventions in Hospital spaces. My research will continue with the aim to strengthen the evidence base for arts interventions in inpatient, secure and forensic mental healthcare environments and explore how creative and arts-based research methods in particular can address issues of marginalization, hierarchy and barriers to access and, in doing so, inform co-designed research and evaluation frameworks that are innovative, co-produced and that generate outputs that are considered "art" on national and international platforms.