David Cunningham
Southern Health and Social Care Trust
Newry & Mourne Area
dcunningham@artscare.co.uk
David Cunningham is employed as multi-media artist-in-residence for Arts Care with Southern Health & Social Care Trust. The Art projects emerge from trusting creative working relationships he forms with both the participants and the clinical staff. The artistic media used within 2008/9 has been; documentary film-making, Storytelling, creative writing, puppetry, mural and canvas painting, clay sculpture, and picture quilt making.
In April 2009 the Newry and Mourne Arts Care committee received centralized funding that enabled all Programs of Care throughout the SHSCT to avail of Arts Care arts projects.
"Making art within a Health and Well-being environment has the potential for us all to experience and focus on the participant as a 'person' rather than a 'patient with a condition.' My work as an Arts Care artist-in-residence' is centred around the creative meeting point where the participant(s) and Health Trust co-facilitators engage in creating art. This process of creating art is seated within the personal, whilst, at the same time, its form as a finished art piece reaches out to seek, to touch and to move others" David Cunningham.
Qualifications
2009 MSc in Art Therapy, Queens University Belfast
2009-1997 Various solo and group concert performances as traditional singer
2009 Arts Facilitator of mixed media Arts Project with people with acquired brain injury and their Carers. Headway Newry
2009 Facilitator of 'Singing Session' in the Rethink drop-in centre, Newry
2008 Premiere of 'Ripples' a one-man play, written and performed by David Cunningham, 'Teach Mallon,' Meigh, N. Ireland.
2008 'Barefoot to School' an inter-generational film and storytelling project with participants from an Early Years Nursery and adults who attend the 'Alzheimer's Cafe,' Camloch and Mullaghbawn, Co. Armagh.
2009-2008 Artistic director and Facilitator of 'Journeys', an Early Years Arts Week in Shafstbury Nursery School, Belfast.
