This Month at The Dragon Café – Sounds, Songs & Stories

A Treatment Journey, Resilience and Living in Boxes of Stone – Three short films by John – This Monday from 12 – 8.30 pm at The Dragon Café.
After the success of the first screening last year, we are delighted to Stay in Touch with John providing another opportunity to view his work. A Treatment Journey repurposes the institutional spaces around him as a studio and site for artistic enquiry. These processes and acts form part of his ongoing attempts to explore and communicate the intricate complexities, contradictions and tensions felt by an individual navigating a psychiatric institution and pathway to recovery.

In Resilience John presents a new video work that explores the capacity of art making as a process to ease pressure, to vent and to release tension. Expression through art is both a strategy for coping and for asking questions of the institution that holds and cares for him. Living in Boxes of Stone is John’s most recent film and expands on the ideas presented in Resilience.

John’s acts of making and reflecting are part of his process of discovery and learning that help him to articulate his ideas, feelings and experiences. John’s nuanced work is an example of where art can sit in the discourse around mental health and justice. Join John for a discussion after the screenings.

About Bethlem Gallery’s Mental Health and Justice project:

‘Bethlem Gallery are at the beginning of a four year, Wellcome funded public programme. We are working alongside a multi-disciplinary research team who are specifically interested in two principal areas of enquiry; the concept of support in decision-making and the concept of decision-making ability relating to mental health and the law. The Gallery’s aim is to engage service users and develop a framework for their perspectives – challenging the often exclusive or hierarchical conversations that have characterised the area. You can find out more about the research here and read about our first wave of artists here.’

There is also an opportunity on Monday to find out more, and express an interest in, a new exciting opportunity for Peer Mentoring in Southwark. Experts by Experience will be with us between 6.30 – 8 pm and would like to meet you if you have lived experience of mental ill health and might be interested in helping others as a paid Peer Mentor.

This Week At The Dragon Café