What practices make you feel cared for and nourished?
Between 2019-2022, KWMC ran an event called Project Night: a space for creatives, making work in community contexts to share ideas and receive peer support. (This has since been relaunched as Community x Arts x Tech Meetups in 2026)
Creativity + Care grew out of learnings from the Project Nights, aiming to create a new programme that explores the themes of radical care and pleasure activism. It provided opportunities for creatives to explore and experience nourishing spaces of care that can support, inspire and enable their creativity.
Where is the care in the creative sector?
Co-curators Roseanna Dias and Josephine Gyasi embarked on a collaborative Research & Development (R&D) process to shape the possibilities and principles of the Creativity + Care programme. In Spring 2021, they invited artists and creatives who were involved in socially engaged / people / community based work to learn from one another and work in dialogue. Together they collectively dreamed up a blueprint for the future: one where care is recognised as universal, reciprocal and central to sustainable and authentic creative practice. Specifically, they explored ideas around Contracts of Care, Creative Care Coordinators and Care Languages.
Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.
– Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Research & Development Notes from Roseanna & Josephine:
“As creative producers, curators and facilitators, we see a sector that often exploits, extracts and tokenises creatives as part of a wider system of capitalism. A culture of hyper-productivity and burnout, and a lack of space for rest, is commonplace – affecting disproportionately those who are already most underrepresented, under-resourced and underserved by the sector.
During this R&D project we’ve been focussing on ways of working that centre people and their care in order to create the conditions for co-creation and creativity to flourish on artists’ / creatives’ (not industry’s) terms. Along with our collaborators so far, we’ve been dreaming up a blueprint for the future: one where care is recognised as universal, reciprocal and central to sustainable and authentic creative practice.”
We’ve learnt that creating in step with artists / creatives and their needs means slowing down and practising active listening – creating opportunities for reflection and shared learning in advance of putting opportunities out into the world. Back in April 2021, we held an initial co-creation session with five artists / creatives to explore what the programme could look like, to help us design the aims and design principles for the project, and to feed into our first artist commission brief.
The following creatives joined us for an afternoon of exploration: Daniel Edmund, Elsie Harp AKA Divina Botanica, Grace Kress, Raquel Meseguer, and Jae Tallawah. We invited different people to hold space during the session and share their creativity and care practices – from breath work to imagining sanctuary together – the afternoon we spent together online felt nourishing and inspiring.”
Roseanna and Josephine documented their R&D process in a zine below, designed by Grace Kress from Shelby X Studios.
Exploring Care Languages
In Summer 2021, Roseanna and Josephine launched an open call for creatives to make work around the first strand of the programme which explored Care Languages. This theme took inspiration from the idea of Love Languages (words of affirmation, quality time, acts of services, gifts, physical touch) which describe different ways of expressing and receiving love. They wanted to expand this thinking into exploring how we express and receive care for ourselves and others through creative practice.
If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?
– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Creativity + Care Project Night
In October 2021, we hosted a special Creativity + Care themed Project Night to share how the chosen artists had been exploring practices of care through creative projects using food, craft, affirmations, sketch-booking and more. Together we explored questions like “What does care mean to you?” and “How do you show care for others and how do you like to receive care?”
A-Z of Care Cards
Creativity + Care culminated in a set of ‘A-Z of Care’ cards. These were led by Roseanna Dias and Josephine Gyasi, designed by Designer Philly and developed in collaboration with creatives: Daniel Edmund, Elsie Harp, Grace Kress, Jae Tallawah, Jade Johnson, Leyla Moazzen, Martha King, Purple Girls Collective, Raquel Meseguer.
In November 2022, we hosted a gentle evening of connecting and reflecting using the cards. It was a lovely way to connect with each other and discuss care. When reflecting on the cards, people said things like…
They are really useful for those who are less used to using this kind of language around care, maybe even as a way to move through conflict too
Photographed by Ibi Feher.