SCOTTISH MENTAL HEALTH ARTS AND FILM FESTIVAL. (Highland)
OCTOBER 2016
INVERNESS TOWN HALL
The arts and mental health
Hello everyone
My name is Graham Morgan and I am not sure why I am speaking today; except I know some people would like to hear from me which makes me very happy.
I used to manage HUG, which many of you will know of, and I have had some involvement in the arts festival here over the years.
I have just over five minutes to talk to you about the arts and mental health and I am not even an artist.
A slightly tall order and yet something that I relish.
For me, being creative in how we express ourselves; whether that be through writing or drama, through painting or photography, by making things; by putting ourselves into something that we pass to others, is breath taking.
Something wonderful.
And I am going to stretch art and expression a long way here. When I put my heart into something as simple as making a meal for people I love. When I choose the vegetables and the spices, when I select the grains and when I create some beautiful dish that I take to the table that people ‘um’ and ‘ahh’ over, I think I am almost doing something artistic.
When I cook for people, I give a gift of my love which I can rarely express in gesture and action and word; I reach out to people.
My partner Wendy does the same by creating wee seaglass necklaces from the glass we collect from the muddy foreshore in Cardross and giving them away as gifts. She does it by making fairy dens for the children; outside of the house, in the woods across the road.
I think even if these things are not art in a conventional sense that they are a way of giving and expressing. They are a way of connecting and making bonds and they are characterised by some sort of beauty.
For me I struggle, like many people I know, to connect to formal art. I would love to be artistic and sensitive and highly intelligent but when I go into an art gallery I feel intimidated and worried that someone will ask me what I think of these images on the walls and when I look at images and paintings, I have never been so moved or entranced that I drip tears or stare entranced for hours but I do like it. I just like it and move like a distracted child from image to image.
I love to see friend’s facebook photos. I love to take pictures of flowers and the sea. I can sit for hours besides a river listening to it; feeling the breeze on my cheeks.
Last year when, by accident, I found myself drawing a picture in an event with the Inverness museum and HUG and Moniack Mhor; which ended up in an exhibition in last year’s festival in the entrance to the museum. I caught myself.
At first I was resentful and confused at the way we created images. I was anxious and worried that I wouldn’t be good at what I did and yet I found myself drawn into it; delighted by the words and feelings and memories I drew and what they said to the people around me; both those who know me well and those who I have never met. I was even more surprised that I was proud of what I had done.
I think it is a difficult thing we do; this seeking to communicate and to find meaning and in the power of the expression of emotion and ideas create something with beauty in it even when we are crude in what we do and even when what we talk about is something that can sometimes be dark and raw.
This festival, maybe any arts festival is a reaching out. It is a way that different communities can connect and different ideas and experiences can be shared and it is a way; a way of liberating ourselves from a host of memories and thoughts.
So far in this festival we have heard from: Syrian refugees, from people who are old and people who are young. We have heard of loneliness and isolation we have heard from the l.g.b.t.q community and from people who have experienced emotions and trauma no person should have to experience.
To me that is amazing. I should really have googled what art means but I don’t think I need to; to me art is expression, and expressing ourselves is both incredibly hard and incredibly complicated. It can be simple too. It can be traumatic and emotional and always when we reach out with our words and our paints and our bronze and our clay and our movements we are communicating. We are reaching out, we are making links and whether what ends up on our canvass is striking or, in our manuscript, is fluid with rhythm. The act; the act of saying
“I dare to speak out and to ask to be heard.”
That is always beautiful and can create such change, such togetherness.
And yes, of course, in connection and the sharing of ourselves, change will always occur and debate come alive and despite the misunderstanding that there may be; there is always a point to speaking out.
I love the fact that we speak out in all these different ways. I love to see people talk; to play with words and images.
When I talk about stigma and mental health. I think art liberates us; telling our story liberates the ignorant and the prejudiced and the story teller too.
To me that is truly wonderful.
I do hope that the rest of this closing ceremony has as big an impact as all the amazing things that you have done in the last few weeks.
This weekend I will be in Achmelvich with other writers. I will be trying to create something readable out of a story of love and of sadness and adventure and horror and I will be aware that maybe no one but my family and closest friends will ever read my book and that it may be something I continue to write for year after year.
But in the evening and at lunch time I will be amongst precious, lovely people. I will feel anxious talking to them so I have already decided to make the evening meal and that may be my gift to art this week: making the gift that gives other people the space and the room to talk and reminisce and bask in the warmth of each other.
Yes; I will be proud of that. I hope you are all proud of all the different ways in which you too try to communicate and express and understand.
Thank you
Photo (‘Friendly Square’ by Danny McNee; taken 11 2020)
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