Arts and Health | Michael Eades

Festival in a Box dementia friendly showcase – June 2016

June 16, 2016 by michaeleades2014

On 15 June, I organised a Dementia friendly showcase for the ‘Bloomsbury Festival in a Box’ project at Age UK Camden’s Tavis House. Every year, the ‘Festival in a Box’ takes the Bloomsbury Festival into the homes of people living alone and with dementia in Bloomsbury and Camden – bringing a ‘cultural meals on wheels’ to some of Bloomsbury’s longest established residents. In 2016, the project has been running primarily as the Bloomsbury Festival’s embedded community outreach programme, although I […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Commissions/Collaborations, Exhibitions, Festivals, Public Engagement, research, Uncategorized

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Festival in a Box: a pop-up exhibition of stories – Oct 2015

December 23, 2015 by michaeleades2014

Back in late October (Friday 16), Dr Catriona Mcara and I curated a one day pop-up exhibition at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh as part of the Luminate Festival of Creative Ageing. The event, ‘Festival in a Box: a pop-up exhibition of stories’ followed directly from our 2014 event Boxes of Delight: surrealism at 90. Drawing on Dr Mcara’s curatorial and exhibition making practice at the Leeds College of Art as well as […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Events, Exhibitions, Projects, Uncategorized • Tags: ageing, curating, dementia, festival in a box, Festivals, surrealism

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Festival in a Box: Archives Exhibition – Sept 2015

September 24, 2015 by michaeleades2014

Festival in a Box: Archives My exhibition ‘Festival in a Box: Archives’ is on display from 21 September to 30 November at the Leeds College of Art. The exhibition draws together selected texts, objects and artefacts from from the archives assembled during the AHRC-funded research project ‘Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia’. Also on display are series of original photographs inspired by the contents of the archives. Between August 2013 and June 2014 the AHRC-funded research […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Exhibitions, Projects • Tags: archives, arts and health, bloomsbury festival, curating, dementia, exhibition, festival in a box, public engagement, surrealism

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An ‘Unconference’ in a Box: Age Camp Leeds – June 2015

June 7, 2015 by michaeleades2014

Age Friendly Cities On Monday 1st of June I got up very early and took the train from King’s Cross up to Leeds for my first ever ‘unconference’. This was Age Camp Leeds, held at the Carriage Works Theatre and dedicated to the topic of creating an ‘age friendly city’. For those of you who have never been to one, an ‘unconference’ is effectively a conference with a defined focus – in this case ‘age friendly cities’ – but no […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Projects

Boxes of Delight: Surrealism at 90 – Oct 2014

October 23, 2014 by michaeleades2014

In October 2014 I was invited to speak and deliver a workshop at the University of Edinburgh, organised by Dr Catriona Mcara as part of the Luminate Festival of Creative Ageing. This event followed on from my Bloomsbury Festival in a Box project, linking that research to Dr Mcara’s work on the memory boxes and other ‘heirloom’ works created by surrealist artists Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), and Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), each of whom worked into their nineties. Our […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Events, Festivals, Surrealism • Tags: ageing, archives, arts and health, public engagement, surrealism

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Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: Engaging Socially Isolated People with Dementia – 2013 – 2014

June 4, 2014 by michaeleades2014

Between August 2013 and June 2014 I was Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded research project called ‘Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia’. On a basic level, this project aimed to take a peripatetic version of the Bloomsbury Festival, a community focussed arts festival in the heart of London, out to local residents living alone and with dementia. The idea here was to offer a chance for people to engage not just in the reception, but […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Festivals, Projects • Tags: ageing, arts and health, bloomsbury festival, dementia, Festivals, public engagement

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Festival in a Box: sharing knowledge on dementia and the arts – May 2014

May 8, 2014 by michaeleades2014

In the dissemination stages of the Bloomsbury Festival in a Box project, in May 2014 I organised a knowledge share day that brought together leading practitioners in the arts and health and dementia, alongside researchers and artists associated with the Festival in a Box project and representatives from Age UK Camden. The main aim of the day was to provide an environment in which the lessons learned from the project could be contextualised in relation to both established and emerging interventions in this field. The […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Events, Festivals, Uncategorized

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The Bloomsbury Festival, or the Bloomsbury Fair? – March 2014

March 29, 2014 by michaeleades2014

It’s the Bloomsbury fair, not the Bloomsbury Festival!’ Such was the reaction of one of my research participants upon our arriving at her flat with the Bloomsbury ‘Festival in a Box’ a couple of weeks ago. This participant is now in her late nineties and has lived in central Bloomsbury since the Second World War. Still living alone in a flat in not far from my own work place, she is just one of several participants whom I have encountered during […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Festivals • Tags: ageing, bloomsbury festival, dementia, festival in a box, Festivals

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Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: opening the first archive – Nov 2014

November 15, 2013 by michaeleades2014

Earlier this week a plain, slightly damp cardboard box was delivered to my office. Whilst hardly looking like anything to get excited about, I knew that this was in fact a very important package indeed. It was nothing less than the first ‘output’ of my research project: the first (albeit very ‘prototype’) Bloomsbury ‘Festival in a Box’. For six days this October the streets and squares of Bloomsbury were transformed. They became impromptu venues for art, music, and cabaret; for […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Festivals

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Arts on Prescription – 2011-12

December 2, 2012 by michaeleades2014

Photograph C/O Nottingham City Arts Arts on Prescription In the final year of writing up my PhD I took up a paid internship working with the Institute of Mental Health at the University of Nottingham and with the charity Nottingham City Arts. My ‘job’ here was to conduct qualitative interviews with a number of individuals who had taken part in that charity’s ‘Arts on Prescription’ (AOP) programme-talking to them about their experiences and undertaking some basic analysis of the programme. […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Projects

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