Esperance artist Jess Le Monier will be facilitating pottery workshops during the Thrive Festival. Photo: supplied.
Esperance Community Arts is hosting its first “Thrive Festival” during the October school holidays.
The free 10-day event will feature kids, teens and adult workshops, including pottery, print making, recycled basket weaving and drumming.
Thrive Festival falls during WA Mental Health Week and Esperance Community Arts coordinator Tracy Hill said the idea was to combine creative practices with mindfulness to boost mental wellbeing.
“The workshops allow a place for people to come, to connect, to share an experience, and to create something at the same time,” she said.
“There was a research study completed about 12-months ago called ‘Good Arts, Good mental health’ and what they found was that irrelevant of how great your art piece is, there’s still great benefits for mental wellbeing by just engaging in a creative practice.
“It’s to demystify the fact that we don’t have to be amazing artists in order to enjoy the process.”
Ms Hill said they were also trialling a wellbeing café for adults called the “Zen Den” and one for children called the “Mindfulness Playground”, where participants could test different artistic mediums.
“There are 10-12 different stations with what we call “snack-sized practices” so just to give that opportunity to have a little go at something,” she said.
“Playing with a piece of clay, maybe you find you touch the clay and don’t actually like the feeling of it so then you don’t have to sit through a whole two-hour pottery class going ‘I really don’t like this medium’.”
Ms Hill said Esperance Community Arts had partnered with the WA recovery college to offer three psychoeducation workshops too.
“It’s things around exploring emotions and writing for recovery, so how writing can actually help us to process and move through things,” she said.
Looking at stress — there’s lots of negative connotations around stress but we can look at the fact there’s good stress, which motivates us to change and then there’s stress that maybe has detrimental effects on our health if it’s experienced over long term.
“It’s the first time we’ve done this, so it’s a little bit experimental but we’ve just been really lucky with the support we’ve received through the Shire, Regional Arts, Healthway and Mental Health WA to put this together.”
Ms Hills said the workshops were free but she recommended people register for them because they had limited capacity.
“Workshops are booking up fast so jump on it, come and have a go, come and have a play,” she said.
Registrations can be made through https://events.humanitix.com/host/esperance-community-arts .
