Art with a purpose...

‘Value All, Equality, Diversity, Stay Safe, Cleaner Air, Pull yourself Up’.
Danielle Chappell Aspinwall

For the fourth instalment of blog postings by artists with rich lived experience of different but connected natures, todays is by Danielle Chappell Aspinwall, who is a Fine Art and Social Practitioner, with these two roles interconnecting through people, place, nature and wellbeing. Originally from Blackpool, and now living in Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, her socially engaged practice explores being neurodivergent as something that positively influences her art practice. Danielle has provided us with links to three short films. Check out her website HERE and take a look at her MA degree show work HERE.

Donkey Fest, Drawing with stitch (close up)

Art With Purpose: Reconnection, Motherhood,Resilience

Artist and Community
 Activist
A Neurodivergent and Autoethnographical Approach

Fine Art and Social Practitioner, Danielle Chappell Aspinwall, interconnects people and art through, place, nature, and wellbeing. Advocating for positive change, unity, and accessibility, she opens up conversations around mental health awareness, hidden disability and subtle ways to preserve our planet with reuse, recycle, remake and relove.

 

Focusing on proactive ways to promote sustainability, reducing landfill towards climate emergency. Using autoethnography in her approaches, she reaches antidotes and systems that art, conversation and reflective practice can empower individuals and communities. Being neuro-divergent, her energy and personable welcome shines in the creative practices and roles she undertakes. She says:

"Art has purpose, to connect, give voice, bring unity, lift spirits and raise awareness for the greater good, not only art can improve social connections, ignite conversations, reduce loneliness. Art within humanity can reconnect people to nature, without the two, we wouldn't live in harmony. Why not take action to make a different no matter how smaller the act, all acts can equate to positive change, inclusion, unity and a hopeful future.”
  

Danielle's 'Art for Purpose' ethos, fuses her passion of advocacy to share unity, inclusion and awareness to remove barriers within the workplace and education systems, to benefit the neurodivergent community and disability groups, giving voice to make a difference, to reduce future suffering of discrimination and exclusion, as well as sharing open deeper understandings of disability within society, highlighting the positive attributes that being #Neurodivergent offers into society, the community and the workplace. Exploring positively through social dialogue, socially engaged practice, projects, public art, social media, as well as community workshops, Danielle aims to lift connections through welcomed imperfections within her bubbly personality and humour.

The importance to remove the stigma attached to hidden disability, reducing the exclusions for inclusive adjustments, enabling access to an opened inclusive wider world, will offer new norms of hope and more opportunities within an inclusive society from a disabled perspective, making a difference for future generations to come to reach further aspirations, higher confidences from deeper inclusion and resulting in healthier mental health and wellbeing. 

In 2020-2021 Danielle was a mentee at Signal Films and Media working on the #SourceProject, #WestCoastPhotoFestival and her #HatsOffRunFreeOurFavouritePlace project on juggling motherhood and being a creative artist with and around the children, letting go of anxiety and postnatal depression. See the website HERE and click on the film above, to find out more.

My biggest thanks to Danielle and to Sue Flowers, Shanali Perera and Ruth Flanagan for sharing their unique lived experiences these last few weeks. I'm sure that their stories will inevitably resonate with many of us.