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Canberra Today 15°/19° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

‘Art from the Inside’ winners announced

THE results of the Mental Health Week art show, “Art from the Inside” held at the Canberra Hospital’s Adult Mental Health Unit from Wednesday to Thursday, were announced on Thursday before the close of the show.

Winning work: a poem on paper by Anjali
According to creative arts therapist, Renald Navilly, judge artist Omagaia selected as the winning work a poem on paper by Anjali, who won a term of free art classes at Open Art ACT.

The Peoples Choice was an untitled biro work on paper and glued on canvas by Lucrecia, who won a $100 voucher to Eckersley’s art store.

People’s choice: work on paper by Lucrecia
On Wednesday at the exhibition opening, Associate Professor Daniel Nicholls, Clinical Chair in Mental Health Nursing from the University of Canberra, took a more philosophical approach than is usual at local art shows, addressing the artists, visitors and carers on the links art, personal expression and society and asking them to look more deeply into the quality of their art and its motivation.

Professor Nicholls said that when seeking about art it was useful to talk about where it originates.

He continued as follows:

“Is art something that is external to us, or is it something that is internal? One way of approaching this question is in terms of aesthetic appreciation.

Some people think about is either good art or bad art in terms of objective criteria (does it represent the “real world,” for example?) while others think that art can only be subjectively appreciated (what does it mean for an individual?) So we see that we can think differently about the quality of art.

We can also think differently about what the inside and the outside might mean. For example, I can think that society is external to me and that somehow I relate to it externally, or I can think that society is expressed internally to me, that somehow everything I express is a product of society.

These  different views show us that the distinction between the inside and outside can be blurred. This question is important for mental health in that we need to think about how we both relate to society and how societal values are seen in ways we think and act.

The inside, then, is not an easy thing to grasp. We might be inside a building or a health service, but outside a group within that building or service – we might coexist internally and externally to the building health service; or we might produce art from within ourselves that is external the moment it is created and re-internalised as someone else appreciates it.

Art moves. It moves from our environmental experiences to our thinking and feeling, and from our thinking and are feeling to the public arena, to be again internalised by others – and sometimes recreated to be again externalised.

The question is not whether “Art imitates life or whether life imitates art” (à la Oscar Wilde) but how the process of art simultaneously animates and expresses our lives both internally and externally.

Art is always approached from both and neither the inside and the outside. Art makes neither insiders were outsiders of us.

That is its enigma… and its charm.”

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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