ART & RECOVERY
Life can be tough, actually life is tough, and after I found out I had cancer and then struggling with work during the pandemic, life was just getting too hard for me, that horrible male pride thing ment I hid away how I was feeling and slowly my life collapsed. Although I had always been a big drinker, this changed and I came to the point of no return, I used this as a tool to escape the world. I became everything I loathed in others and found it difficult to live with this everyday. In 2025 with the support of my beautiful amazing wife, I managed to reach out for help. I have no doubt that if my life had carried on either the drinking or the thoughts that depression bring would have killed me. I spent 3 months in rehab for alcohol addiction and learnt alot about coping with life and coping without alcohol. I also discovered my passion for creativity and could see first hand the power of this as a tool for recovery. A combination of lived experience, my role as a recovery worker and my own practice organically started to collide, I wanted to use art as a tool to support others as they start a journey from addiction to long term sobriety and beyond. I have now designed a series of art workshops that support people in recovery and am lucky enought to teach this on weekly basis. Watching people engage with art, lose them selves in creativity and spark conversation about pasts and positive futures is rewarding and humbling.
Each week is a stand alone workshop that lasts any where between 30 minutes to 3 hours. Designing the sessions this way means it keeps it engaging and allows new people to join in, as its new task each session. The other important thing around the shortness of the sessions is to give people a taster of many different things as possible. Art is not for everyone, but exploring lots of different ideas helps people find what they enjoy. Its important to remember that boredom is one of the main reasons for relapsing and I beleive strongly in unlocking old interests, new hobbies and passions, and believe that these sessions are a tool to support this.
“I think that nobody quite knows which drink it is that takes him over the edge of being merely a social or hearty laughing drinker, into a morose and hung over wretched creature who shakes and creaks and sweats and has nightmares and it’s always November and it’s raining and it’s three o’clock in the morning and there’s nowhere to go and you reach out for a cigarette and smoke and think about all the horrible things you’ve done in your life and all the shames - you’ve endured and suffered, and the shame you gave other people and the wrongs you’ve done other people. I don’t know whether alcoholics can put it quite as eloquently as that; usually they just say, I just stared out of a window for two years – and it is, believe me, […] it is no laughing matter – it really is not a laughing matter…”
Actor Richard Burton, TV interview 1980
Sessions include:
Photography
Printing
Animation
Painting
Experimental Drawing
Video
Sculpture
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ART & RECOVERY AND WHAT I OFFER PLEASE EMAIL: info@denbuilding.co.uk
