Dwell Time

I had hoped to update sooner but my hard drive died. I bought a new harddrive and and caddy and miraculously retrieved my data off the dead drive.

I bookmarked a load of links I’ve been reading on my phone as I couldn’t seem to copy and paste links into the blog interface without everything messing up so have stored up a few links for one blog post:

First it made sense to see what other a-n artists had written. I remember reading Alistair’s blog when it was first published and thought how refreshing his honesty was in discussing these ‘career suicide’ issues. https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/artists-mental-health-depression-neither-romantic-inevitable It’s a bit of a heavy label to say ‘this is about mental health’.

The link between creativity and mental health is in some ways well trodden, popularist ground, and google will throw up result like this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creative-explorations/201503/creativity-and-mental-illness but to find any indepth inquiry without subscribing to academic journals seems a bit hard to come by. Maybe this is a search term issue as it’s such a wide field.

You can find google results naming names of ‘artists and mental health’ eg http://www.hungertv.com/feature/five-contemporary-artists-exploring-mental-health/ but it doesn’t give much information further than a vague overview.

As a parent, my children’s mental wellbeing is now of utmost importance and these kind of headlines catch my eye: http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/08/how-should-we-talk-about-mental-health-in-schools-heres-what-the-experts-say-7164921

Emotional intelligence and emotional wellbeing starts from infancy, but mental wellbeing is lifelong. If we don’t learn early, these skills may be lost or hard to reach. ttps://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10156247468906407&id=638951406

I also found that there’s a Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival https://www.mhfestival.com/ and they have a few video uploads, the men’s mental health one was particularly interesting: https://m.facebook.com/mentalhealtharts/video_grid/

TED talks are also a useful resource and this on resonated in relation to our project: https://www.facebook.com/TED/videos/10159946160830652/

Finally, my co-curator Vanessa Haley found this gem by Virginia Woolf on illness:

“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”

What: Dwell time: The time a train spends at a scheduled stop without moving. Typically, this time is spent boarding or deboarding passengers, but it may also be spent waiting for traffic ahead to clear, or idling time in order to get back on schedule.

Dwell Time is a newspaper published by Platform 1 for the Penistone Train Line in Yorkshire that seeks contributions concerning reflections on your own or someone else’s mental wellbeing. We are seeking drawings, illustrations, poetry and personal stories about real life, raw feelings and survival stories; more about the journeys more than the destinations.

The Penistone Line is a slow and scenic journey from Huddersfield to the steel city of Sheffield, through beautiful countryside and over Penistone Viaduct, plus a stop at Meadowhall shopping centre.

Almost 300 people died in suicide incidents on Britain’s railways in 2016/17, according to Office of Rail and Road figures, including on the Penistone Line. According the the mental health charity Mind: Approximately 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year. In England, 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression) in any given week. 20.6 in 100 people have suicidal thoughts 6.7 in 100 people have suicide attempts and 7.3 in 100 people self-harm.

Who: You don’t need to have any experience or training. You may be a professional artist/writer or you may never have drawn or written anything like this before. You might be a train enthusiast, daily train commuter or travel on trains rarely. You may be local to a Penistone Line station or be from a completely different part of the world. Perhaps your contribution is about your own mental health or a family member or friend’s. Everybody has mental health just like physical health; whether considered in good shape or not, therefore everybody is eligible to contribute with reflections on these topics. You may also submit anonymously or using a pseudonym if you prefer.

Where: The newspaper will be distributed on the Penistone Line trains travelling from Huddersfield-Sheffield. Calling at: Huddersfield, Lockwood, Berry Brow, Honley, Brockholes, Stocksmoor, Shepley, Denby Dale, Penistone, Silkstone Common, Dodworth, Barnsley, Wombwell, Elsecar (limited stop), Chapeltown, Meadowhall and Sheffield. The Newspaper is for a general audience (everybody) to pick up and read and therefore we ask that contributors are mindful of content being appropriate for all ages. All contributions will be published on the newspaper blog so if you have something that may not be suitable for a general audience but would like it published on the blog, please do send it us.

When: The Newspaper will be launched in Spring 2019 and all contributions will be added to the blog as they arrive.

Payments/fees: There are no fees required and at this stage no payments available for contributors. The Newspaper will be printed with sourced funding and distributed free to the public.

Criteria and selection process: Images should be high resolution (300 dpi ideally) and can be full colour or greyscale. Text submissions should be up to a maximum of 750 words as a guideline and sent in an editable format. If your text requires specific formatting/alignment please indicate this in your submission.

Co-editors Alice Bradshaw, Vanessa Haley and Lenny Szrama will select contributions for printing in the newspaper. Once the deadline has passed and we have reviewed all the submissions, we will make a selection and inform all contributors whether or not your work has been selected for the first issue.

To submit: Email: avavprojects[at]yahoo.co.uk (replace [at] with @) with high resolution images or text in editable format. Please include what name/pseudonym you wish to use or whether you would like your contribution to be anonymous. If you would like a link to your website or blog please also include this.

Deadline: End of 2018 for publishing in the first print issue of Dwell Time.

About Platform 1: Platform 1 (previously known as Huddersfield Men’s Shed) is a charity based at Huddersfield Train Station that helps men living in isolation due to mental health or addiction issues. It offer many varied projects such as carpentry, bike maintenance, gardening, upholstery and upcycling, education to help with benefits and housing problems and counselling. Platform 1 helps members reconnect back within their communities.