Happy Christmas From Borderline Arts!

It’s Christmas Eve! We’re all rather excited about Christmas and then getting into action in 2017! We've created a summary of our 2016 events for you to reminisce with us! First of all, however, please accept our massive apologies for having to cancel the Art Attack and the Awareness Workshop in May. In the new year, we will be in touch with those who signed up for the May workshop with a new date, and we are looking to do the Art Attack in May 2017...so all is not lost! Despite a period of inactivity due to illness this year, we’ve still actually done a fair bit of awareness raising! Read on for a recap...

Awareness Workshops and Stalls

We ran a few BPD Awareness Workshops for Health Professionals and for our volunteers, which were really successful. We manned awareness stalls at Derby College, complete with a photo booth to create interest from afar, conversation and encouragement to engage with us on social media, in the hope that if someone felt unable to ask questions in person, they may be able to find some online.

Awareness Raising with the Minister of State for Health

We facilitated a creative breakout group at the event ‘Forward Thinking’, with Amanda Solloway MP, Alistair Burt MP (Minister of State for Health), and James Morris MP (Chair of the Cross-Party Group on Mental Health). Our group discussed the question 'How can the arts play a bigger role in combatting Mental Health?'. We then had the opportunity to feed back to the Forum and the MPs. This was an excellent opportunity for us to discuss Mental Health issues and our views on it with people who, ultimately, have the power to help change things. We have built a really good relationship with Alistair Burt and Local MP Amanda Solloway over the past year or so, and they ask us advice on what we feel would be helpful for sufferers, which is a fantastic opportunity! Thank you Amanda and Alistair for your support!

Rethink Art Exhibition and World Mental Health Day Event

A couple of our artists also submitted some artwork into an exhibition that the fantastic Rethink Steps held at Quad and some other artwork to an event they ran for World Mental Health Day in Derby. The exhibition had a HUGE turn out and celebrated the things that make us feel positive. Thanks for letting us join in with both events Rethink!

Therapeutic Art Group

We ran a series of 6 Therapeutic Art Group Workshops for people with BPD. It was a really fantastic vehicle for people with the diagnosis to get together and make friends/support each other/gossip/and make some interesting artworks. You can read more about how it went here. A HUGE thanks to Keziah Smith for running this incredibly valuable group!

Online Art Gallery

We have also recently added an online Art Gallery onto our website. The art is by people who have BPD and it expresses their experience of living with it. Each image has a description. You can have a browse of that by clicking here if you’d like to! It's well worth a look! We will be continuing to add artists' work, so keep coming back!

Creative Writing Workshop

In January we held a creative writing workshop (facilitated by Chrissie Hall) for those with BPD. We generated a load of literary works of such genius that some had be kept in a padlocked box with 'open in 2035' on the lid. Chrissie was full of expert knowledge - she has scripted the TV series 'Doctors' - and great tips and exercises to help people realise their potential expressing themselves in words. Huge thanks for running it Chrissie!

Safe Space Workshop

We most recently joined forces with Quad and Daniel and Antonia (two artists that have recently been commissioned by QUAD to create works around safe spaces). As part of the commission they are running workshops around the theme, and we were very lucky to have them run a workshop for us, which was fantastic and really beneficial! You can read more about the workshop here.

Borderline Arts Team Changes

We’ve had some major changes with our team structure this year, and I want to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to Zoe Savva, Hannah Thami, Nikki Veitch, Ben Thomsett, Gordon Paul and Peter Cadney who were an invaluable part of our team, but for various reasons have had to move on. We really appreciate all your time and energy and support - THANK YOU! We have had some fantastic new people join our team - so we want to introduce you to and welcome Kev Bagshaw as our Chairperson, Pauline Sharper as our Secretary and Lesley Edwards as our Treasurer. We are really excited to have you on board! If you’d like to volunteer with us, please get in touch!

So, What’s Happening In 2017!

Frankie is our much loved film project we are working on with the help of Derby Quad. Obviously these things take time and many, many hours of debate and writing and organisation but things are moving along swiftly. We are developing the script and trying to figure how to best represent the many facets of BPD on the silver screen. Once we have confirmation of funding, we will be going full steam ahead, so watch this space!

As mentioned earlier, we will be running the rescheduled Art Attack and Awareness Workshop. We hope to run other Workshops too. On February 11th, we are holding a coffee morning - more details of that to come in the new year!! We will let you know of other plans as and when they unfold! But it’s looking like 2017 should be a good one!!

As always, don't feel afraid to contact us if you want to volunteer or donate or contribute to our Charity. We love what we are trying to do......and we love you too. Have a fantastic Christmas and New Year from all at Borderline Arts...and we will be in touch in January!