Look Back: Creative Health Research Symposium - Social Care and Creative Practice
In June, Creative Manchester hosted the 2026 Creative Health Research Symposium, welcoming the Creative Health community in Manchester to the Core Technology Facility on campus to discuss all thing social care and creative practice.
We started with Paul Hines, CEO of who invited attendees to share their own ideas around creative health and participation. He introduced the audience to Made by Mortals鈥� work, which is centred around facilitating creative projects with drawn from lived experience of healthcare. He also shared more about 糖心Vlog官方鈥檚 work with Made by Mortals, exploring participatory arts for health in research.
Rod Kippen, from , then shared the charity鈥檚 work, particularly through , a creative space and art gallery attached to their mental health provision for young people. He explored some of the problems that artistic spaces have when connecting with young people and showed some fantastic projects and artwork created by young people at The Horsfall.
In our final talk, Dr Hannah Waterson, gave us an overview of her research trip to Japan as part of a delegation sent to Tokyo to sign a Memorandum of Understanding between Creative Manchester, Tokyo University of the Arts and The National Center for Art Research, Japan. She had the opportunity to visit a wide variety of Creative Health projects during her time in Japan and shared with us some highlights including visiting community goats, who have inspired some more unusual creative projects using their hair and even their droppings!
We ended the day with a Happy Place workshop led by ; participants were welcomed to create a collage to create a visual representation of their happy place.
During the breaks we showcased Creative Health work from across the University of Manchester, which included artwork from 鈥�H鈥�, 鈥� and 鈥�.
Find out more about research theme.