Here at The Art House, we feel privileged to have secured invaluable funding – from Leeds Hospital Charities and NHS Charities together – to support people across Wakefield to thrive and develop after the pandemic through our Re-Emerge programme. The programme is co-ordinated by The Art House, with accompanying research carried out by Dr. Jessica Bradley PhD SFHEA.
The Re-Emerge programme began in late 2021, thanks to two years’ funding from Leeds Hospital Fund
and NHS Charities Together, to support people whose mental health has particularly suffered during the
pandemic to gently re-engage with others in a creative and healthy setting. We are committed to focusing
on the diverse needs of our community and partnered with a variety of local organisations as well as
partnering closely with Spectrum People, who harness the power of the creative arts to support the mental
health and wellbeing of vulnerable residents in the Wakefield district.
In 2023 we secured further funding from Wakefield Mental Health Alliance with a particular focus on supporting perinatal mental health across the Wakefield district. In August 2024 we were awarded two years’ funding from the Baring Foundation to deliver an arts and health programme specifically targeted at men with mental health issues. This will be delivered in close partnership with Gasped who work with people in the Wakefield district experiencing emotional distress and particularly with men. We will again be working with Dr Jessica Bradley and also Dr Sam McKay, a theatre maker, researcher, lecturer and project manager with a wealth of experience working with men’s creative health projects.
We are currently looking to secure more to keep this vital work alive. If you would like to find out more or work in partnership with us to deliver please get in touch.
If our Arts & Health programme sounds like something that you, or someone you know, may benefit from, you can get in touch by filling in a contact form.
Our team are available to discuss a person’s individual needs and how to best accommodate them, and are more than happy to help.
Please be sure to mention Re-emerge in your form
Get in touch
Diane Saxon
Diane joined The Art House at the start of 2022 to manage the new and exciting Arts and Health programme. Her background of culture and community work experience, paired with her genuine interest in museums and galleries in her spare time, made the opportunity a perfect match.
Diane has been volunteering and working in the culture sector for over 20 years now, developing schools and family & community programmes. During the pandemic, she worked with a variety of vulnerable people in homeless services. Her time of work during Covid shone a light on the need for creativity in supporting health and wellbeing, alongside housing and other support services. This enhanced Diane’s commitment to improving accessibility for creating arts and cultural spaces that are truly for everyone.
Dr. Jessica Bradley
Jessica Bradley is working with the Re-Emerge project team to evaluate the programme and undertake research. Jessica is a researcher in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, where she also co-leads the BA in Education, Culture and Childhood and teaches across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes. A linguist by training, she is interested in how people work together creatively, particularly in participatory and community arts contexts.
Her PhD (University of Leeds, AHRC-funded, 2018) explored multilingualism and multimodality in street arts performance and production and subsequent projects include the Multilingual Streets programme which explores how people experience multilingualism in everyday life. Jessica is co-founder of the AILA Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics Research Network and co-editor of the book Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (2020). She has also published about ethnography (2017; 2020), arts practice (2018) and creative inquiry (2019; 2021; 2022). You can find out more about her work here.
