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African Objects: Psychoactives, Spirituality and Mental Health

Saturday 19 April

Portraits of Recovery invites people from Black and African- Caribbean communities to participate in a unique artistic collaboration with artist Divine Southgate-Smith and Manchester Museum’s Living Cultures Collection.

 

Participation is open to those with lived experience of mental health and/or in recovery from substance use.

Register Your Place Now!

Dates:

  • Sat 19 April
  • Sat 26 April
  • Sat 3 May
  • Sat 10 May
  • Fri 16 May
  • Sat 17 May

Times:

  • Arrive: 12.15 pm
  • Workshop begins: 12.30 pm
  • 30 min break
  • Workshop end: 3.30 pm

About the Project

Living in a complex world – our place within it can often feel overwhelming. A need for spiritual nourishment, be that the universe, mother nature, or religion, feels ever more pressing. An absence of personal spirituality can, for some, lead to mental health or substance use issues.

Culturally, the use of plant-based Psychoactives for ancestor worship, and religious or spiritual purposes within the African diaspora is long known. Contemporary thinking, now controversially looks towards Psychoactives for improving our health and wellbeing.

Over six weeks (from April) and a series of creative workshops, led by artist Divine Southgate-Smith, participants will engage with African objects from Manchester Museum’s Living Cultures collection – uncovering new meanings, histories, and current cultural significance. Working with the objects, you’ll create new, personal, and collective responses through storytelling, discussion, and creative exploration.

Why Get Involved?

  • Gain hands-on meaningful experience of working with museum collections
  • Engage with urgent conversations on spirituality, mental health, and recovery
  • Work with a contemporary artist, and learn or brush up on your creative skills
  • Meet new people, have new experiences, and develop new supportive networks
  • Be part of collaboratively created artworks for showcasing at Manchester Museum in Recoverist Month, September 2025

Interested? Register or find out more by emailing: info@portraitsofrecovery.org.uk

Lead Artist

Divine Southgate-Smith (b. 1995, Lome, Togo) is a British trans-disciplinary artist. Her work often references and questions articulations of black, queer, and female experience. Her approach to artmaking is medium non-specific, allowing her to explore complex narratives through various mediums and disciplines.

Project Partner

Manchester Museum displays work of archaeology, anthropology and natural history in a way that attempts to confront the past with honesty and transparency, putting communities at the heart of what they do.

MYRIAD

We are delighted to be delivering a Test & Learn project as part of MYRIAD; a project strand within the Greater Manchester Creative Health Place Partnership.

The three-year place partnership aims to create lasting ways for creativity and culture to be at the heart of communities’ health and wellbeing. This builds on the growing recognition that engaging with creativity and culture helps us to lead longer, healthier, happier lives – a relationship that is increasingly referred to as ‘creative health’.

Greater Manchester’s Creative Health Place Partnership is part of Live Well; GM’s movement for community-led health and well-being and will focus on pioneering new ways of supporting residents to live as well as they can, by creating new, community-led approaches with culture and creativity at their heart.

MYRIAD aims to support the delivery of culturally competent, community-based mental health and wellbeing support with and for global majority communities.

There are five test-and-learn projects taking place across Greater Manchester and each one includes a placement from the MYRIAD SPARKS training programme.

MYRIAD is supported by NHS GM Integrated Care and Baring Foundation. The GM Creative Health Place Partnership is further supported by Arts Council England.

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