Culture

Helium Arts reaches out to vulnerable children during pandemic

Distance Creates project allowed cocooning children continuity with creative expression

Our World in a Window is drawn from the work of 49 children across 18 counties in Ireland.

Sara Keating's face
Sara Keating
Tue Jul 6 2021 - 00:00

For arts organisations across the country, the pandemic posed a challenge: how to reach their target audience. For Helium Arts, who have been connecting children with long-term health issues since 2010, the pandemic actually offered them an opportunity to expand their connections with vulnerable children in a very concrete way. As Helium Arts’ founder Helene Hugel explains: “for many of the children we work with, the isolation that came with the pandemic is not new. Their everyday lives have always been affected by risk of infection control or hospital treatment. Many of them were already being home schooled.”

With schedules full of hospital appointments and therapy, life for those with long-term health conditions is often defined by journeys to and from clinics, with little time for creativity. As Helium was forced to reconsider their practice in line with Covid protocols, they saw an opportunity to adapt their art practice, which was usually in person, to the new conditions of social remoteness, and with that came an expansion of their reach beyond health-care settings and into people’s homes.

Their Distance Creates programme allowed cocooning children continuity with creative expression and those who would usually be excluded from Helium’s activities because of location an opportunity to connect with them.

“We weren’t another thing that they had to drive to, which is exhausting and expensive,” as Hugel puts it. Zoom was of course an important forum in creating this reach, Hugel says, but so too were older technologies, in particular the post. As Hugel points out, “digital connection comes with its own issues of access, particularly for rural communities” and the organisation was determined that there would be no barriers for participation.

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When Helium Arts was founded 11 years ago, its aim was to bring quality artistic experiences and opportunities to young people who are traditionally excluded from cultural participation in other areas of their lives. The ambition was two-fold: high-quality artistic experience was at the centre of Helium’s philosophy – art for art’s sake – but they were also driven by a belief that art had many vital psycho-social benefits for the vulnerable young people. As Hugel explains “these are sick children, so meeting their physical needs is essential, but this must be done within a broader context of emotional, social and mental well-being.”

People with long-term health conditions often experience feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety, “a feeling that their lives are defined by their diagnosis”, she says, and the “creative arts can be an important part of the healing process” in particular for young people. “A child is a developing being, so you can’t just look at the physical side of things. There are other needs that must be met for their emotional and social development too.”

Over the years, Hugel and her team of artists have witnessed first-hand the transformative effect that the creative arts has on young people’s lives – a reduction in stress and anxiety, improved ability to cope with illness, increased wellbeing, confidence, social interaction, self-esteem, and hope – while carers and parents have reported other mental and physical benefits too.

Sheila O’Brien’s 12 year-old daughter Saoirse, for example, was born with hydrocephalus. “She is a very creative person,” O’Brien explains, “but [before helium] she never really tried to do anything because simple tasks would be quite overwhelming for her”. Working with Helium’s artists allowed her to be guided by professionals to “unlock her interest and her creativity”, but it “also taught her organisational skills, how to break everything down into small simple steps, and so she is able to work with the projects and do them, and that helped with school and everything”. The carer of another participant, who has arthritis and lupus, said the hands-on creative work had significant physical impact too: “like doing physiotherapy, without him realising”.

Competing priorities

To celebrate their 10 year anniversary, Helium commissioned a report to evaluate the testimony that they have collected over the years from participants in their programmes, their families and healthcare workers, and transform it into solid data. As Hugel explains, “recreational, creative and spiritual development isn’t always given priority within the therapeutic process. Doctors and nurses are interested in the science of what we do, and healthcare managers want data to back it up. There are so many competing priorities and the arts can be seen as ‘arty farty’, but it is an important part of the holistic picture.”

“If we translate what we do into the [data-driven] language of cost efficiency,” she continues. “It enables us to move towards our bigger goal, which goes beyond improving the lives of individuals, and moves towards embedding the arts in healthcare settings. For that we need buy-in from health and government services.”

The report’s findings are certainly persuasive. An evaluation of Helium’s community programme, for example, shows that 90 per cent of 117 participants surveyed reported feeling less isolated and having better wellbeing, 100 per cent felt more creative, with 68 per cent reporting being able to cope better with their illness. To put it into economic terms that management might understand: “for every €1 invested, our work generated a social return of €1.98”, which translates as an impact that is worth almost twice as much as the original investment.

Complementing the release of their formative study is a celebration of the creativity of Helium’s young artists in a national exhibition that expresses their very particular experience of lockdown, where social isolation was heightened by their vulnerability. Our World in a Window is drawn from the work of 49 children across 18 counties in Ireland who participated in Helium’s Distance Creates programmes with artists Chelsea Canavan and creative engineer Gerry Byrnes. It features animations and mechanised artwork and will tour to venues in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Longford.

Saoirse is one of the children whose work is on display, and her mother says that the opportunity to have her work displayed cements the transformative effect of Helium’s work.

“It is the confidence that it has given her. [The realisation] that you don’t have to be a famous artist just to have an exhibition. That what she does or makes matters.”

  • Our World in a Window runs from Silkes Art and Crafts, Limerick, Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, Dublin and Longford County Library July 2nd-11th; Galway City Library, MacDonagh Junction Shopping Centre, Kilkenny and Civic Offices at Cork City Council, July 23rd- August 4th.
  • The full report ART WORKS|Harnessing the power of health and the arts for children is on helium.ie