Mental Health For Artists 2026

Mental Health for Artists returns with a season of talks exploring care, vulnerability, and sustainability in creative practice. Across five events, artists share ways of working that are rooted in attentiveness, lived experience, and long-term thinking.

This year’s programme looks closely at how artists sustain themselves and their practices. Through conversations about tenderness, grief, regeneration, seasonality, and world-making, the season offers space to reflect on how we live, work, and care within contemporary art.

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

Curtis Holder is an artist whose practice is rooted in dialogue with his sitters. His drawings emerge through dynamic, febrile lines that trace the evolution of their relationship. In this talk, Curtis explores how his work gives visibility to people whose stories are often overlooked in mainstream narratives, revealing tenderness, presence, and emotional resonance.

• Book your place

About Curtis

Curtis Holder first gained public attention after winning Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year (2020). His work has since been recognised through major institutional collaborations and awards, including The John Ruskin Prize (2024) and is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, MCC Museum at Lord’s Cricket Ground, and Soho House.

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

Join artist and writer Leah Hickey as she weaves romantic love and familial loss through a semi-autobiographical, interdisciplinary practice. Bringing together experimental prose, free verse poetry, Early Modern English, typographic painting, stone engraving, and Victorian Valentines’ cards, Hickey unpacks the complexities of grief and its lingering hauntings within an intuitive, emotionally led practice.

• Book your place

About Leah

Leah Hickey is an artist and writer informed by heartache, a term used to mediate between grief, love, limerence and loneliness. Her work is emotionally led and influenced by women on screen, Romantic thought and Christian morality. She is recipient of the Sir Whitworth Wallis Fellowship 2025–26 at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMaG), where she is researching the material processes and histories of Victorian-era Valentines’ cards, and she also recently received a DYCP to develop the publishing imprint, Tentative Press.

A very brief introduction to Permaculture for artists, with Liz Postlethwaite

This participatory session offers 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. Liz invites attendees to work together using the elements as a starting point to consider the energies that shape our work, projects, and lives. We explore how mapping these energies can help frame what we do in a more grounded, less reactive way.

• Book your place

About Liz

Liz Postlethwaite is a community artist and organiser with a wide ranging practice which is grounded in over fifteen years of learning as a permaculture designer and regenerative practitioner. Her work bridges and unites a range of different disciplines and creates communal discourses, often between strangers in public spaces, motivated by a desire to better understand the way that culture, art and imagination can create new ways of doing things, to help envisage alternative futures.

Growing a seasonal art practice, with Fred Hubble

Questioning whether a four season framework still holds us as it once did, Fred explores how seasonality shapes wellbeing and how artists might attune more closely to phenological rhythms through creative practice.

• Book your place

About Fred

Fred Hubble is an artist-researcher concerned with relationships to place, time, climate and culture. His practice explores seasonality through relationships that incorporate the experience of being with and alongside seasons, the recognition of sequence within lived experiences in different climates, and the tension between climates, phenological, meteorological, solar, and cultural events around which we build culture.

long~life: world making as sustainable practice, with Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 will share how world-making lives as a long-term, sustaining practice, one that allows ways of making to continuously grow, stretch, search and regenerate. Drawing from diasporic experience, ancestral storytelling, and Daoist and ecological thought, Song reflects 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.

• Book your place

About Rae-Yen

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 shares how world-making lives as a long-term sustaining practice, one that allows ways of making to grow, stretch, search, and regenerate. Drawing from diasporic experience, ancestral storytelling, and Daoist and ecological thought, Song reflects 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.

Since launching in 2022, the programme has grown into a valued fixture in our calendar, creating a supportive space to explore the systemic, personal, and intersectional challenges that affect artists’ lives.

Each season features a series of free online talks and Q&As covering:

• Personal experiences of mental health in creative practice
• Practical strategies for sustaining wellbeing
• Inclusive conversations on how to make the art world a healthier, more equitable place

Events are open to all and designed to be welcoming, accessible, and relevant to artists at every stage of their career.

If you are struggling, please know that support is available (see resources at the end of this page).

Price:  Free
Location:  Online
Catch-up:  Members can watch all events again in the Community

• Register for Your Tickets

We know the unique pressures artists face - financial insecurity, isolation, lack of recognition and the toll these can take on mental health. Our aims are

• Challenge stereotypes around artists and mental health
• Support sustainable practice by sharing tools and approaches that help artists navigate challenges
• Foster openness and care within the arts community

• Curated events: Talks, workshops, and panel discussions led by artists and specialists.
• Resources: Articles, guides, and toolkits to support mental health year-round.
• Community: A growing network of artists committed to care, and mutual support, 

The programme builds on the insights and connections of previous years.

2025 highlights: perfectionism in art, networking for the socially anxious, somatic approaches to wellness, equitable curating, and finding your audience.

• Read the 2025 round up

2024 season
Burnout and creative care, listening as a form of support, pleasure and queerness in textile practice, grief and artistic renewal, and returning to art school later in life.

• Read the 2024 round up

The next season launches in February 2026. Event details will be announced in January.
 

Sign up to our membership to hear first when bookings open.

If you feel that you’re in immediate danger of seriously harming yourself, Please:

• Call 999
• Go to your nearest Accident & Emergency (A&E) department.

If you would like to talk to someone who is trained to listen, these organisations are here for you:

• Samaritans: Call 116 123 (free, 24/7) or email jo@samaritans.org
  www.samaritans.org
   
• Mind Infoline: Call 0300 123 3393 (weekdays 9am–6pm) or email info@mind.org.uk
  www.mind.org.uk
   
• Shout: Free, 24/7 text service. Text Shout to 85258
  www.giveusashout.org

If you're struggling and need ways to cope, Mind has resources to help:

• www.mind.org.uk/need-urgent-help