Mental Health for Artists 2026

In 2026, Mental Health for Artists brought together artists, writers, and researchers for five free online events exploring at how artists sustain themselves and their practices. This year’s programme looked at tenderness, grief, regeneration, seasonality, and world-making. The aim of the season was to generate more nuanced conversations about artists' mental health and to provide space to reflect on the ways we live, work, and care within contemporary art.

Highlights from the Season

Silent Echoes, Spoken Truths: Drawing Tenderness—with Curtis Holder

Curtis Holder spoke about how his work gives visibility to people whose stories are often overlooked in mainstream narratives, revealing tenderness, presence, and emotional resonance. Reflecting on his recent solo show at Leeds Art Gallery, he described his process of bringing out the voices of people of the Global Majority in Leeds through dialogue and drawing.

“Portraiture...can be very one sided. I'm always a little bit reticent to call myself a portrait artist. I draw people.”

Curtis Holder

Emotional Outbursts: Love, loss and a semi-autobiographical practice—with Leah Hickey

Leah shared her interdisciplinary, semi-autobiographical practice which brings together experimental prose, free verse poetry, Early Modern English, typographic painting, stone engraving, and Victorian Valentines’ cards. Readings from her recent essays reflected on the complexities of grief and its lingering hauntings within an intuitive, emotionally led practice.

“This merging of autobiographical experiences, with fiction, with free verse poetry, with prose allows you to embed truth..."

Leah Hickey

A very brief introduction to Permaculture—with Liz Postlethwaite

Liz offered a brief introduction to permaculture design and how it can inform creative practices that are more regenerative and restorative, for the natural world and for ourselves. She invited attendees to use the elements as a starting point to consider the energies that shape our work, projects, and lives—and how mapping these can help frame what we do in a more grounded, less reactive way.

“In extractive cultures, the processes within them don't allow ecosystems to replenish themselves, so over time the systems become more and more extractive—and the capitalist system that we're part of is a deeply extractive system."

Liz Postlethwaite

Growing a sustainable art practice—with Fred Hubble

This event will be rescheduled.

Long~Life: World-building as sustainable practice—with Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊

In this poignant performative essay, Rae-Yen explored how world-making lives as a long-term, sustaining practice that allows ways of making to continuously grow, stretch, search and regenerate. Referring to her current exhibition at Glasgow's Tramway and drawing from diasporic experience, ancestral storytelling, and Daoist and ecological thought, she reflected on how resilience emerges through imagining alternative forms of kinship and rehearsing ways of being with others, human and more-than-human, towards more hopeful, shared futures.

"The way I've been able to sustain [my art practice] is through an iterative way of working... This kind of long-term exercise and this evolution of a practice can sustain itself through projects."

Rae-Yen Song

Why It Matters

This season continued to expand the conversation on artist wellbeing, blending personal testimony with practical approaches to self-care. Feedback highlighted the value of hearing directly from artists who have navigated mental health challenges in their own practice.

By holding space for honesty, care, and solidarity, Mental Health for Artists strengthens a growing network committed to making the arts a healthier and more inclusive place.

Member exclusive: Watch again

Recordings of all events are available for members in the Axis community area.

Find out more about the annual Mental Health for Artists programme, including the latest season and upcoming events, on our Mental Health for Artists page.