Over four days during October and November, members of the Student Wellbeing Group participated in ‘Wellbeing Workshops’ with DSFC’s Artist-in-Residence, Cloe Sparrow. 

During the four sessions, the group experimented with many different mediums and techniques. The aim was to create a piece of artwork to submit to Kooth’s ‘Overcoming Negative Emotions through Art’ competition, whilst also creating art that eased our minds and expressed our feelings in creative ways. The group submitted a variety of different pieces from all participants and created a digital collage book titled ‘Sometimes We Need to Burst Outside the Line’.

In our first workshop, we focused on journaling and relieving stress through creating “zentangles”, not focusing on having a specific outcome or design but on creating these intricate shapes and corners, as a way to quickly take your mind off of anything stressful. During the second week, we worked on black-out-poetry using pre-loved books, which ended up being a favourite amongst us. Week three’s focus was on book-binding. In week four, we focused on creating our collaborative art piece for the Kooth Competition.

Kaitlyn – “My favourite session was creating Zentangles during week one. I found that creating the swirl shapes and focusing on the different patterns you can create relieved a lot of stress which built up throughout the day, as well as being fun to create. The workshops with Cloe definitely helped us to focus on our wellbeing as well as embracing our personalities and emotions through art.”

Anna – “It opened us up to new ways we never thought of to relax our minds and I found it quite therapeutic, especially the zentangles session. Overall, I found the workshops to be a nice way to let go and create and see other perspectives on what mental health means to them and myself.