Creative Brain Week – Knowledge Making

In the background to the second was the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a pair of agreements in April 1998 that ended most of the violent ethno-nationalist conflict on the Island of Ireland which had taken place predominately in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom.

Perhaps it was these two significant moments that encouraged reflection at CBW23 on the nature of care systems, their behaviour and relevance in the long term.

If we inherit the dreams of our grandparents made real as institutions and their behaviours, or codified as culture, how do we recognise when the issues they dreamt of addressing have changed? How can we then build our own dreams?

In a connected world how do ideas travel? How is care made? Can we tread carefully between knowledge that is biological or imperial or cultural? Is creativity as culture a way to propagate care alongside formal health care systems? Can it increase the care within them?

We wondered if conflict, as a root cause for ill health, applied at individual as well as systemic level, might this apply for all the wide diversity of our online and in the room audience? It lead to the themes of CBW23 of “Conflict. Imagination. Joy”

Therefore the second programme began from the specifics of research in Ireland indicating that conflict from decades before continues to have an impact on the Brain Health and physical health of the people of Northern Ireland (Ciaran Mulholland).

We were able to reach out to experts in creative intervention able to show how over decades, arts, craft, and creative practices had had multiple benefits. Programmes that have endured long enough for youth involved to have grown and now set the agenda for the concerns of contemporary art practice (Rachel Clarke Hughes and Derry Playhouse)

With access to global expertise we were able to ask if and how this impact on individual neurology, on people’s Brain Health, applied in other conflict and post conflict zones. (Agustín Ibáñez).

In this publication from those foundations we broaden the focus. Inviting you to consider how attitude affects the mind, and the role that hope plays in healthcare. We look at the creation of health and care systems that begin not in bio-medical or acute systems but in the cultural realm. We touch on the role of creative practice for the earliest stages of brain development and the final stages of life. We look at how creative practices benefit brain health when life takes an unexpected turn or we are born in circumstances that are not conducive to health.