Creative Arts and Health Forum

Rosie Perkins is Professor of Music, Health, and Social Science at the Royal College of Music London. Part of the Centre for Performance Science, Rosie’s research investigates two intersecting areas: how music and the arts support wellbeing, and how to optimise musicians’ mental health. Rosie has particular interest in how music can support parental wellbeing, and she is co-founder and co-chair of the Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance.

Rosie is an honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London and a Fellow of AdvanceHE (FHEA) and the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). In 2019, Rosie was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Music (HonRCM), and in 2025, she became an Affiliate Researcher with the Jameel Arts & Health Lab.

A series of paper presentations will run from 13:45 to 15:45.

Creative Health in London. Ann Woolf (London Arts & Health)

Hear from Anna Woolf, London Arts and Health's CEO. Creative Health is growing and changing in London, with more infrastructure, ambition and better understanding of the impact of this work.

Anna will explore some of the ingredients of Creative Health across London and share how London Arts and Health helps and supports this.Anna Woolf FRSA is London Arts and Health’s CEO.

Anna has lived experience of birth trauma and has worked with UCH maternity (2018) Tea and Toast: Poems for New Mums (which was acquired by the Wellcome Collection in 2025), Maternal Journal Maternal Journal(2021) and The Mum Poem Press (2021) Songs of Love and Strength exploring this topic. Anna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Society of Public Health.

Pain Exchanges. When Fine Art meets Pain Medicine: Overcoming bewilderment through ‘intellectual empathy’ Professor Deborah Padfield (SHMS, CSGUL)

^{Photo credit: Deborah Padfield with Jillie Abbott and Chandrakant Khoda, ‘Untitled’ from the series Face2face, 2008–13. Digital Archival Print. © Deborah Padfield}

Deborah will give a brief outline of her inter and transdisciplinary work exploring the visualisation and communication of persistent pain.  She will discuss the challenges and benefits of working within an interdisciplinary team where one person’s methods are an anathema to another, where scientists grapple with the empirical value of metaphor and artists with the relevance of p-values.

She asks how you navigate this divide to produce research that is more than the sum of its parts and publish in respected journals?  She suggests through; remaining open, interpersonal and academic respect, and what one of her colleagues, Tom Chadwick, has termed ‘intellectual empathy’.

Art for art’s sake? Valuing artefacts in creative health research through the RESPOND framework. Professor Nicola Shaughnessy (University of Kent)

Arts-based practices are increasingly used in youth mental health research, yet the creative outputs they generate are often under-analysed, limiting their potential contribution to knowledge production.This paper examines the RESPOND framework as a structured, practice-sensitive approach to interpreting artistic artefacts as data.

Drawing on findings from participatory “living lab” research with young people, researchers, and arts practitioners, RESPOND is presented as a scaffold for meaning-making that integrates affective, cognitive, and relational modes of interpretation. The framework comprises seven stages: React, Engage, Sensing, Pattern, Observe, Novelty, and Dialogue, each supporting a different dimension of engagement with creative work.

The paper argues that RESPOND enables a sequenced yet flexible interpretive process that begins with art-immanent observation and moves toward contextual and dialogic understanding, while preserving individual voice and ethical sensitivity. Through application of the framework to a selected artistic stimulus, the paper demonstrates how meaning emerges iteratively through embodied response, pattern recognition, and collective reflection.

RESPOND is positioned as a valuable methodological tool that enhances interpretive rigour in arts-based mental health research while maintaining the participatory and experiential values central to such work.

Alternate Worlds: Creative Engagement, Multisensory Experience & Art Affordances in Mental Health Contexts. Dr Ruth Herbert (CSGUL) Dr Emma Williams (University of Surrey) and Dr Cristina Harney (University of Leeds)

Further details about this paper will be shared soon.

A short break will follow before the next session resumes.

Jointly chaired by Ruth Herbert (SCC) and Katie Rose San Filippo (SHMS).

Panel members: Giorgos Tsiris, Tullis Rennie, Nicola Shaughnessy, Rosie Perkins, Neta Spiro, Anna Woolf .

Join us for a drinks reception at 16:30 in ALG11, offering an opportunity to network and continue conversations from the day.

This 90-minute interactive workshop invites participants/audience to explore an audiovisual practice first developed in mental health and wellbeing contexts.

The workshop explores intersections between the senses and subjective experience, utilising immersive, multimodal processes of Turkish paper marbling (Ebru) and simultaneous musical looping and layering of crowd-sourced sounds and musical gestures.  How do the sonic and visual attributes of an audiovisual practice support wellbeing through multisensory trancing and a heightened awareness of the present?

^{Photo credit: Kate Garcia}

Jackie Walduck is a composer and percussionist whose practice explores improvisation, collaborative  composition  and multisensory experience. She is  an  active performance-maker,  researcher  and Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, creating multisensory performances (Miso Kitchen, 2020,  Diagnosis: Drifting Dreaming Waiting, 2021) and site-specific  works  at  Crossness Pumping Station (Cleanse, 2024), and  Thornham  Magna (Sensing Nature, 2017).

In 2025 Jackie was awarded the Association of British Orchestra’s Health and Wellbeing Award for her  musical  leadership  with  people experiencing homelessness and  The Academy of St Martin in the Fields  orchestra.  She is  co-editing a  book:  Composition and Improvisation: Combinations, Intersections and Liminal Spacesfor Routledge.

^{Photo credit: Sean Kelly}

Chloe Cooper is an artist and educator. She makes zines, prints, animations,  placards  and billboards. She has  exhibited  both nationally and internationally and works with people in museums, schools, community centres,  prisons  and hospitals to create artwork in response to their experiences and surroundings.

Chloe has exhibited at Tate Britain, London; nGbK, Berlin; Beursshouwburg, Brussels; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; Sanderg Instituut, Amsterdam; ICA, London; Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; Whitstable Biennial; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Serpentine Gallery, London; Rupert, Vilnius; The Tetley, Leeds; Tate St Ives; Arnolfini, Bristol; AirSpace, Stoke-on-Trent; The Exchange, Penzance and TULCA Visual Arts Festival, Galway, Ireland.