Last month I was lucky enough to receive a bursary to go to West Dean House, in Chichester, to explore my work around Landscape drawing. I use landscape often in my work to explore emotion, symbolism and narrative. The recent piece of work that I have featured in the Prescriptions Exhibition (photos in my last post) is made up of landscape drawings to express narratives of Chronic Obstructive Pulmanory Disease.

This week away was an opportunity to spend some time exploring these themes in a pressure free environment without having to look towards a finished piece of work. During the course I learnt an extensive range of ways of drawing and connecting with landscapes. In particular I revisited the use of drawing as research, which was inspiring and will influence my future practice.

Can you spot my work in the middle? What an amazing collection of Artists books related to medicine. Who would have thought there were so many!

Prescriptions is a juried exhibition of book art to supplement Martha Hall’s exhibition of works as part of Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities symposium and workshop, organised by University of Kent and University of New England. Hall's books, created from 1998 until her death in 2003, document her experiences with breast cancer and her interactions with the medical community. The symposium, which will launch the exhibition, will explore connections between artists' books, health/illness and medicine from interdisciplinary perspectives. It will include invited keynote presentations, panels, a poetry reading, an exhibition tour and a documentary screening that features Hall.

Last Month I had the pleasure of being Artist in Residence at DECLARATION festival.

DECLARATION took place at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow from 3-6 March. The festival was the result of a unique partnership between NHS Health Scotland, the Mental Health Foundation, the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the ALLIANCE) and the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

The programme featured 30 events - a mixture of film screenings, performances, debates, workshops and provocations, each one inspired by one of the 30 articles in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with a focus on how human rights and the right to health come alive in Scotland today.

The organisations behind Declaration have come together as part of Scotland’s National Action Plan on Human Rights (SNAP), and the programme is based around the SNAP themes of Better Culture, Better Lives and Better World. The festival will build on the First Minister’s vow to ‘do even more even better on incorporating human rights in Scotland’, and is part of an on-going commitment to the right to health and social care in Scotland.