Centring: Co-Creative Ceramics in the Living Museum

We offer six ceramic artworks created by participants living with brain changes, in-cluding diagnosis resulting in dementia. These artworks were built as part of a co-cre-ative research collaboration between design researchers at Northumbria University and Beamish Museum, a living museum in North East England. At time of writing, we have undertaken nine months of weekly workshops at the museum, introducing ceramics craft practices to a group of Health & Wellbeing service users, none of whom had worked with ceramics before this project.

The project’s name, Centring is a response to both the ceramic practice of centring, placing and affixing a mound of clay in the middle of a pottery wheel in order to create a stable piece of work, and the therapeutic practice of centring, a technique that can help people find balance and peace in their lives, which can be used to help regulate stress, process trauma, and build meaningful relationships.

This work is a development of our longstanding research relationship with Beamish Museum’s Health & Wellbeing team, having previously explored craft practices in wood with members of the group, and other community organisations. This work contributes to the growing body of evidence for the importance of arts-based creative practice for people living with cognitive impairments and dementia [6], and the nascent Creative Ageing movement in the UK.

Objectives
The objectives of this design research have been: 1. To foster a sense of social commu-nity through craft, in the model of existing ‘men in sheds’ projects, which have been found to combat social isolation, increase independence, and build empathy. 2. To ex-plore the role of craft materials and processes in supporting these activities, facilitating self-expression, cognitive stimulation, creative engagement and skills expertise. 3. To understand both how ideas within theories of dialogicality and personhood can be un-derstood in this specific making context and 4. To reflect on how practices across de-sign and health and wellbeing fuse and inform one another.

Process
The methods and process of this research have been craft-based making. Longitudinal, emplaced, and embodied workshops have been designed to be as inclusive and engag-ing as possible. These workshops have gently scaffolded creative confidence and de-signed to nurture new talent in the group, evidenced in the artefacts we submit here for exhibition, described below. As time has progressed members of the group have grad-ually gained in skill and confidence and have been teaching staff members how to make certain pieces as well as supporting one another in the making of pottery.