Art Based Health Projects

These mini projects use innovative art-based methods to promote key messages around diet, exercise & health.
 
Edible Images
Explore Exercise
 
Edible Images
A local secondary school was the venue for this combined art and health project. After privatising their school meals in Sept 05, the school was keen to re-design their dining hall into a more grown up café style eating environment. The edible images project was born and the idea was to create a visually appealing dining environment using artwork produced by year 10 pupils at the school. Creativity was the name of the game as all table top designs and wall hangings (which depict sporting activities) were created using fruit and vegetables.
 
Edible Images has been created by students from St. Luke's School working with artists from Dot to Dot and the Health Improvement & Development Service (HIDS) of Portsmouth City Council. The project was funded by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.
 
Two sessions per week were run over a 5-week period, during which time the year 10 pupils, chopped and prepared fruit and vegetables to create images on a wedge or square templates, these were photographed and then manipulated to form the tabletops. The young people also took images of sports happening within the school, scaled these up and then re created the action figures, again using fruit/vegetables/seeds and herbs as the design tools. These were photographed and then voted on by all the pupils at the school and the 10 most popular images were selected as the wall hangings for their new dining room.
 
The sessions were fun and lots of really good work was produced. The young people involved were enthusiastic and the sense of achievement for those whose designs are on permanent display in the dining room is immense. The school's dining room has now been transformed into a colourful, pleasant and appealing eating environment.
 
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Explore Exercise
A partnership based art and exercise project run over four sessions with Year 4 pupils from a local primary school participating. Each week eight different children took part in a range of fun activities. Encouraging them to think about walking as a great form of exercising, plus looking at why we need to exercise, the benefits of regular exercise and how our body changes when we are exercising (heart pumping blood, lungs oxygenating blood and muscles used etc).
 
'The workshops were devised and led by Jeannie Kerswell, resident artist at the local healthy living centre and commissioned by HIDS, with a food and health worker from the team supporting the workshops. Funding was provided by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.
 
After a short walk from the school wearing pedometers to record the steps taken and looking out for particular things on route (encourage children to be more observant when walking) the children arrived at the art room within the local healthy living centre. After a brief introduction into what the session would entail and a short talk about exercise, the fun began via three experiments.
 
The experiments all involved moving around in different formations (using different muscles/limbs) and making marks to create a pattern of activity. Pedometer readings were taken after each experiment and used by the artist in her residency. At the end of the session the children swapped their pedometers for a goodie bag filled with information and activities around healthy eating, exercise and oral health, they then walked back to school. The children were very keen to participate in all the experiments and learnt a lot from the sessions. The simplicity of the project made it very easy to run but still got the key message across and achieved very positive results. The artwork was given to the local primary school for display purposes.
 
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