Patient-led flourishing

Patient-led flourishing session

Natasha Duggan and Gavin Blench will lead a creative workshop involving listening, slowing down and noticing your lived experience and your environment. Participants in this workshop will need access to paper and liquid colour (e.g. ink, paint, tea!). Natasha and Gavin are artists with lived experience of ill-health.

Natasha  Duggan

Natasha is an experienced Community artist working across different medias. She lives in the New Forest, where she uses volunteers her creativity to raise awareness of environmental issues and advocating art for health and wellness.

Having Marfan Syndrome has impacted on her life over the past decade, having surgeries to replace her aorta because of emergency aortic dissections and aneurysms, requiring her to live a slower paced life and be present for her teenage daughter. 

Her art can be seen on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/natskiduggan_art/  

Gavin Blench

Gavin is a painter living in Devon. After studying sculpture and aboriginal music (involving a year in Arnhemland as part of the Gumatj clan), he worked with vulnerable young people with challenging behaviour and then went on into teaching, both at the University of Plymouth and the Open University. After a diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis ten years ago, he decided to pursue his passion for art. He has been a full time, award winning painter since. He was part of the Alternative Visions Exhibition and is now both a member of Arts and Health Southwest user advisory group and a Lived Experience Network champion. His artwork can be seen on https://www.instagram.com/blenchart .

Pre-session

Gather some materials from nature, and some ink or tea or coffee to paint with

Read a bit more about Natasha and Gavin's work on the flourishing symposium website. 

Fractal https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/why-fractals-are-so-soothing/514520/ 

Permaculture https://www.earth-ways.co.uk/sit-spot/#.YZ0kIvHP23I