Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival Commission 2025
“We are excited to announce that Erin McGrath, HUSS, Jennifer Honnan, Robyn Woolston and Rylan Gleave have been commissioned to create new pieces of work in response to this years festival theme ‘Comfort & Disturb’. The commissions will explore bipolar disorder, post-natal depression, disability, displacement and living with a brain tumour diagnosis, each from a deeply personal perspective, rooted in lived experience. The work includes two short films, a sound piece, a comic, and a textile artwork. The commissions will be showcased on our website and, in some cases, at events during the festival.”
The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2025 (SMHAF) will take place from 20 October to 9 November 2025. Led by the Mental Health Foundation, the festival is a platform for everyone to create and share art inspired by mental health, engaging audiences and participants in regions across Scotland: https://www.mhfestival.com
Bio:
Robyn Woolston is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work “navigating the thresholds where material, memory, and ecology converge”, often working outside of galleries, in landscapes, archives and national parks. Robyn plans to make an artist film in response to a recent brain tumour diagnosis, drawing parallels between her own health-based turning-point and the climate emergency, and inviting viewers into “the quiet, sometimes disorienting space where devastation and beauty co-exist”.
“The work journeys through the visceral experience of living within a body, and mind, that has become both familiar and yet foreign. Referencing the unseen membranes of the self (the meninges or brain lining), the film mirrors a planet in crisis. Just as the brain tumour disrupts the internal ecosystem of the self, so too does climate change disrupt the symbiotic balance of the Earth.”
