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)
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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.