THE

BEGINNING
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ARE YOU
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^OUR ETHOS

Future
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MAGGIE’S
CENTRE
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SITE VISITS
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Double agency
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New-Old

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IMAGINATIONARY
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1.

Beginnings

What is CAHN?

We are a collective of researchers, patients, artists and healthcare workers keen to understand how 'creative health’ comes about, both in practice and theory. Rather than only asking if Arts in Health projects are successful, we want to unpick how criteria, languages, institutions and assumptions inform how ‘successful’ projects are defined and recognised.

We want to facilitate open-minded and critical conversations where more nuanced understandings can be developed. This process includes reflecting on our own values and considering what ‘criticality’ can achieve across fields, professions and life experience too.

The Critical Arts in Health Network (CAHN) began in 2017 with the sharing of frustrations over the narrow terms of success set by field of ‘Arts in Health’ - fiscal as much as biomedical, instrumental (making community), curative, palliative and ‘evidence-based’.

CAHN - an ugly acronym that stuck! - emerged between people drawn from different disciplines including arts management, art, social science and radiography (based at Sheffield Hallam, Manchester Metropolitan and Queen Margaret Universities).

Visiting selected sites, we use our different methods to pull apart some of the lumped together assumptions about Arts in Health, paying attention to differences in regional and national UK arts in health provision and the ways that practices are ‘haunted’ by past structures and values.

The task of reflecting on the value of arts in health sensitively and critically has become more urgent, in light of the challenges brought about by the pandemic. It looks likely that the arts will be deployed to address (or conceal) profound inequalities considered intractable. The pandemic has also altered forms of convening and communicating so that every activity, whether for health or for the arts, can’t rely on old methods of reaching people.

This context makes it especially important for us not to fall into easy or simplistic ways to understand what the Arts might have to do with Health. Armed with a new twitter handle, @yeswecahn, this website was developed in 2021, to create online space for people committed to re-making the field of Arts in Health through shared critical attentions.

Image 1. Anthony Schrag demands perfection! (part of The Cultural Institute’s Utopia Season, Kings College London, 2016)

Image 2. Mural of nurse with halo, Central Manchester spring 2020