Portraits of the Brain Workshop series

Join our Portraits of the Brain workshop series!

We invite you to take part in Portraits of the Brain, a workshop series that offers the opportunity for a two way learning experience between researchers investigating Multiple Sclerosis (MS) from University of Edinburgh and people living with MS.

During the three workshops of the Portraits of the Brain series, you will be teamed with a scientist and work together, in a relaxed and informal setting, through various creative art activities to explore the diversity and complexity of brain cells, to create an illustrative image of your brain and explore recording your bodily movements, like a seismograph. The art activities do not require previous painting or drawing experience, their aim is to facilitate communication and collaboration. Thus, the emphasis is on starting conversations while collaborating on a creative process and not on the final image product created.

We want this to be a genuine collaboration, and for you and the scientists to bring their own experience and understanding of MS whilst engaging in the image making process. Neither of you may have any experience of art but we hope that through conversation, exchange of ideas and creative endeavour each will benefit from this workshop.

This is an exciting opportunity for people living with MS to exchange experience and ideas with scientists. These scientists are passionate about their research but may not have had direct experience of the disease they are studying. They have signed up to this workshop series to have the opportunity to hear the journey, experiences and challenges of people living with MS. You will also have the opportunity to hear first-hand from the scientists what it is like to be a researcher, what motivates them, what challenges they face and all about their science. This isn’t a lecture but a chance to meet, chat and create with scientists at different stages in their career. We encourage all our participants to come with an open mind.

The First workshop will start with a scientist introducing a specific type of brain cell, its complexity and the research surrounding it and challenges in understanding its role in MS. You will then be teamed up with a scientist and engage into painting an image of a portion of that the cell type. The completed image will be recreated by bringing together the images created by all the teams.

During the Second workshop you will be teamed up with a scientist to explore the inner workings of the brain. Similar to our brain cells communicating through electrical and chemical reactions, you will be creating a portrait of your brain using simple chemical reactions of lemon juice and baking powder, (acid and base, respectively) to create a colourful image of your inner perception of your brain.

We are also pleased to have Hannah Laycock , our invited speaker. Hannah specialises in portrait photography, currently inspired by her diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. She will give a presentation on how art is being used as a tool to express, share and deal with the condition and the daily living. (https://hannahlaycock.com/)

During the Third workshop our invited guest, artist Deborah Humm, (http://deborahhumm.co.uk/wp/) will take you through her journey of living with MS and how she uses art to capture and shape the discourse of what it means to live with MS. You will be teamed with a scientist and during your conversations you will be capturing the movements of your body with a pen and paper much like recording an earthquake through a seismograph. Drawing can be one way you can articulate internal processes and it can be empowering!

We encourage you to register to any or all of the workshops within Portraits of the Brain series!

We hope that Portraits of the Brain workshop series will benefit all participants by:

• Creating a relaxing and comfortable environment.

• Encouraging conversations which enrich our mutual understanding of MS from different perspectives.

• Building confidence and learning new skills.

• Enjoying the act of creativity

We very much hope to share the images produced from this workshop series with others. As such we will seek permission to allow artwork to be photographed for publication online and in print publications and for original images to be exhibited at a special showing of the works and potentially future such exhibitions.

We will also seek your permission for photography during the workshops, to capture the creative process. You will be free to choose not to be included in such photographs.

We hope you can join us!

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