Presentations will enable us to reflect on how art therapists attend to context and relationship, meeting challenges creatively and developing new, exciting ways of working. Making art across the day will deepen and enrich our thinking, drawing out the links to practice to inform questions and discussion.

We will see how taking account of context and relationship can also help us to hold onto what is core about our practice and to maintain integrity; guiding the way we incorporate research, different ideas, and use new opportunities on the horizon.

The day will offer inspiration and grounded, critical reflection to enable participants to feel better equipped to innovate – safely, effectively and with integrity – enhancing art therapy practice in service of our clients and the communities we support.

Presenters

Keynote speaker Dr Lynn Kapitan

Lynn Kapitan, PhD, ATR-BC, HLM is a Professor Emerit and former Director of Graduate and Doctoral Art Therapy at Mount Mary University (USA). Former Executive Editor of Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association and Past President of the American Art Therapy Association, she was awarded its highest honour for her contributions to the advancement of art therapy.

In this conference opening, Dr Lynn Kapitan will explore how art therapists are finding their grounding in environments of continual disturbance, tension, and disorienting complexity, and reconfiguring practice as innovative pathways of connection, transformation, and resiliency.

Dr Jed Jerwood

Dr Jed Jerwood (PhD) is a principal art psychotherapist at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham.

Dr Jed Jerwood will present his work on the No Barriers Here project, an award-winning, internationally acclaimed model of advance care planning.

Jason Wilsher-Mills

Jason Wilsher-Mills is an artist. His work celebrates disability, his northern working-class heritage and popular culture through cutting edge technologies and brightly coloured, largescale humorous, but challenging art.

Jason was awarded the Adam Reynolds Award  by SHAPE Arts and has exhibited around the world, including this years Venice Biennale. Jason also has an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, ‘Jason and the Adventure of 254’, which will be open during the conference.

Jason’s exhibition, ‘Jason and the Adventure of 254,’ is all about his experiences of becoming disabled as a child. It is inspired by the objects from Wellcome Collection’s anatomical collections, which triggered memories of his own hospitalisation during childhood. The exhibition installations are based on hundreds of sketches he did every day in the run-up to the show. Jason will lead us in an interactive art making workshop, responding to those same objects and prompts, to explore together how creativity works and where it comes from.

More to be announced in the coming weeks!

Early booking recommended!

As this is an in-person event, this year’s conference has a limited number of tickets available. We recommend you book early to avoid disappointment.

Booking for this event will close Friday 18 October 2024 at 10am.

About the day

Venue

The Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. It is a short walk from Euston Station, London.

Speakers

We will be announcing speakers and a full programme over the coming weeks.

Lunch

We will be offering delegates fresh and delicious food options for lunch included as part of your booking. We will be asking delegates for dietary requirements.