Mansfield Museum

Supporting women at risk with Art Power

Mansfield’s high levels of deprivation includes women experiencing trauma from domestic violence and abuse. MARAC (multi-agency risk assessment conference) repeats have increased from 25% to 33% between 2020 and 2021 due to the increased volume of high-risk cases (DA Partnership Board 2022). Art Power focuses on participatory activities in the museum to explore how we can learn from each other and make positive change.

The museum delivers creative experiences for at-risk women, inspired by the museum’s collection and directed by the participants’ interests. Facilitated by the community projects assistant and supported by artists and an art therapist, the museum is discovering the ‘herstories’ within its collections.

Funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the project’s goals are: to build confidence, promote a sense of place, encourage pride in creation, make friendships, and stimulate long-term engagement with place, people and things.

Building on research by Joan Tronto, Helen Chatterjee and Nuala Morse in the field of culture, care and wellbeing, the project informs a PhD entitled ‘Art Cares’. The collaboration shares resources and strengthens capacity to make an impact.

The project sees the museum service working with many partners, and the council has achieved Domestic Abuse Housing Association accreditation, while NIDAS provides training in domestic violence awareness for museum staff. Facilitating staff have trauma-informed practice training and access to supervision to ensure effective safeguarding practices are put in place and to ease the emotional toll of the work.

Creative workshops encourage mindful engagement with process and creation and, along the way, friendships are made and support networks built.

Participants are now meeting outside the workshop and increased self-esteem can be noticed – for example, some participants have delivered workshops to their peer groups, sharing skills in jewellery, French knitting and crochet. Two initiative participants have applied for gallery assistant roles.

One group, having started by accessing workshops in their own ‘safe space’, now feel confident enough to visit the museum and ideas for long-term engagement are developing as relationships grow.

Collections care workshops and creative writing activities have developed in response to the participants’ interests. A broken decorative dog was rescued from a skip, appropriated by one of the Art Power groups, and then transformed with a collage and provided inspiration for a poem.

Participants have produced clay tiles, felt shoes, enamelled miniatures and woven bodices, and one of them has created a wind turbine – now displayed in the museum’s climate exhibition.

Groups visit art and heritage sites, and one woman was overcome with emotion when visiting the museum’s café after a tour of the lace gallery, saying: “I can’t believe something so nice is happening to me.”

Participants were involved with the museum’s Windrush exhibition, helping to paint a mural. Free stitch embroidery is proving popular and appliqued work tabards designed by participants are to be accessioned into the museum’s collection.

The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale is used to monitor health outcomes over the two years of the project and participant interviews take place every six months. The project began in March 2022 and so far over 100 workshops have been delivered. 79 women are registered with the project, 45 women have attended and 31 are now regular attendees, none of whom visited the museum previously.

20 women from the groups made headdresses and paraded in Mansfield’s first Caribbean carnival, a development from the museum’s Windrush exhibition, which was testament to their improving self-confidence and developing sense of place.

The project held its first exhibition on International Women’s Day in March 2023. It was created and curated by participants, who wrote their own museum interpretation labels and installed the show, wore Art Power t-shirts, and celebrated with a museum full of friends and family at their open evening.

A second, more ambitious exhibition is planned for March 2024. The project team has also made a short documentary of the Art Power project with Squeaky Pedal, with the full contribution and editorial control of the women participating in the project.

Art Power was shortlisted for the Best Museums Change Lives Project award at the Museums Change Lives Awards 2023.