Stress Awareness Month: How can art making benefit our wellbeing?

When Marcelo’s one-off workshop on health and wellbeing through art making was met with an overwhelming response of sign-ups, he knew he had stumbled upon a real need experienced by many of us: having a creative outlet to process experiences and improve our wellbeing, both as individuals and in community with others.

Trained as a visual artist with his own art studio called Applied Live Art Studio, he designed Central Saint Martin’s short course Health and Wellbeing through Art Making. As Applied Live Art Studio focuses on socially engaged practice, his studio has also been able to host a community after completion of the course.

For Stress Awareness Month, we spoke with Marcelo about the wellbeing benefits of art making and how we can balance our art practice as work and recreational activity:

Hi Marcelo! Why do you think people are drawn to art making and creative practice to support their wellbeing?

Creative practice is a mode of communication that we can't always put into the spoken or written word.

Sometimes they help us express some of the more complex things that we may be feeling; sometimes we don't even know that we're feeling them. So, creativity and creative practice and artmaking allows you to have a conversation with your subconscious, emotionally engage with materials and mediums, and then have a look at what's being created and try to make sense of it.

I think that engaging in art making with a specific purpose for wellbeing steals time for us. And that's really important, because especially in a city like London, everyone feels like they don't have enough time, and that urgency is also something that prevents you from engaging in the kinds of things that you need to just heal.

Students that take the course often share that it has become a really sacred time. I know that for 2 and a half hours a week, on this evening, I'm just going to engage in this topic. There's a discipline to that, which we don't always do, as we often prioritise other things because they feel more important than our wellbeing.

Do people require a particular skills-level for art and creativity to have positive, stress-relieving effects?

The course is not necessarily designed for trained artists, although many trained artists might take the course. But it's really about how you engage in the creative process, and you don't need to have trained skills for that. It's opening everyone up into being able to engage in a creative process.

If you are a formally trained artist, and a designer, who many of them are as well, you often want to perfect something so bad that you might become quite rigid at what you do. The work that you do when you start thinking about your artwork in professional terms might not be for your wellbeing. It might actually be really stressful to make that artwork, because it becomes a bit of a job. And that's fine, because that's part of the work.

But you still need to retire back into a private, comfortable space of creativity, which might even fuel that more forward-facing work. I do think it's important to crawl back into the cave and make your cave paintings that you don't show anyone.

For arts students, their arts practice and studies can often be sources of stress throughout their studies. How can we balance the pressure of creating art for our work or studies and using creativity as a stress-relieving activity?

In the first session, I give them permission to let go of good and bad: it's impossible to make something bad when you're engaging in health and wellbeing through art making. There is no good and bad, there is only engaging in your wellbeing. It also means that you don't necessarily have to frame everything you make; you can put it in the bin, it's fine. The process is what's important, not the outcome. And that's a  very different relationship to art making.

[On the course] we don’t think about wellbeing as happiness, because I don't think wellbeing is the same as happiness; wellbeing is being able to stay afloat through the highs and lows, because that's an inevitability of life.

I think [coping with stress] is also about identifying part of your process. Especially art students might not have a full process in mind yet. It’s something you develop for your whole life. A lot of what is happening in art school is that you're creating work, and you're presenting it and you're having a critique on it. You might be marked on it. You might be graded, you might have to write essays on it, but it's a very public display.

An invitation would be for students to think about: Where are the spaces where you're creative, and your art doesn’t need to be shared? What might you say in that secret space? I'd have a little secret practice on the side, one that's not critiqued or shared or judged. That's your little secret practice. I think that's a nice little wellbeing nugget that our students can have.

I love your suggestion of a secret practice! Could you give us some examples of what that might look like?

It depends on what your medium is: It might be a sketchbook where you work out your ideas, but you're not really showing that to anybody. It might be that you keep a dream journal, it might be that when you walk down the street, you just freestyle poetry into a microphone on your phone. Everyone's going to have a different way that they need to explore to be creative. It's just ensuring that you have them and that you're not always thinking about your work that's on public display. What's that secret thing that you don't feel you need to share and that no one's going think is good or bad?

You must have various routes in which your creativity is outputted. This also gives you permission to have different types of validation. I think it's important to seek out the different ways that we get validation, especially because you won't always succeed at the things that you want to. People have ups and downs – even the people that seem like they're super successful, they're probably the ones that often suffer the most around validation. Try having different places where your whole self can be validated so that you don't trip yourself up and feel too bad about things.

Find out more about Marcelo’s work and Applied Live Art Studio.