Creative collaboration within the field of arts and health research, young people's learning environments and in the social care sector has involved developing workshops, community events and recording/training with oral history groups.
Click on images for captions
Participatory projects developed with children and educators over twenty years has shown the benefits of working with museum and gallery collections through engaging with artists. Many of these have built on work that uses the museum as an extended classroom. An ongoing project 'The Museum of Me' uses the practices and traditions of museums to encourage children and teachers to research their particular communities and personal histories, using unusual media and contemporary art processes.
Much of the work completed in the 'Project Stories' section of this website is relevant to an ongoing collaborative research project about fragmented family histories concerning loss, survival, and exile. A legacy of treasured family photographs is the starting point for sharing rich but forgotten worlds of manufacturing in stocking, lace and wallpaper across Europe. As a result the research proposal 'Tree' was submitted to the Centre for Cultural Value as a collaboration between educator and museum professional Elaine Bates and artist Michelle Olivier.
EB Collage experiment before Cultural Value Submission
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HT Collage experiment before Cultural Value Submission
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Starting with the idea of growth and building on collective documentation we took the image of the tree to suggest possibilities for research into family trees, broken trees (exile) and trees as symbols of past, present and future (roots, branches and buds).
Elaine Bates MA (Early Years) is a researcher, educator and museum professional. Michelle Olivier's work explores how mixed race people and relationships are represented, and her collage work is concerned with these complex issues.
'Looking Harder, Thinking Differently' was a research project with The Dermatology Centre at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust based on a pilot programme begun in 2015 to find out if visual observation skills in trainee dermatologists could be improved through analysing works of arts and working with an artist. A unique collaboration between a research medical team, patients and Salford Art Gallery enabled the group to make a difference in the training of new recruits to dermatology.
Elaine Bates MA (Early Years) is a researcher, educator and museum professional. Michelle Olivier's work explores how mixed race people and relationships are represented, and her collage work is concerned with these complex issues.
'Looking Harder, Thinking Differently' was a research project with The Dermatology Centre at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust based on a pilot programme begun in 2015 to find out if visual observation skills in trainee dermatologists could be improved through analysing works of arts and working with an artist. A unique collaboration between a research medical team, patients and Salford Art Gallery enabled the group to make a difference in the training of new recruits to dermatology.
The University of Nottingham's 'Clay Transformations' project investigated the therapeutic uses of clay and was part of an important project developing clinical research teams (in this case psychologists) with artists.
Publications include exhibition catalogues and learning materials for Arts Council England, Bolton Art Gallery and Museum, Bury Art Museum, Manchester Art Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary.
I continue to teach graduate and postgraduate students of Fine Art, Museums Studies and History of Art and Design. Previous visiting lectures include at the University of Bolton, Manchester Metropolitan University, Nottingham Trent University, Staffordshire University and Wolverhampton University.
