The Creative Wellbeing series is a partnership between Creative New Zealand and All Right?, shining a light on the transformative wellbeing and hauora benefits that arts, culture and creativity provide. Read the full series here.
Last month, I joined the global tens of millions who have lost their jobs due to the financial effects of Covid-19 pandemic. Permanent employment hasn’t always been my world so I thought I was pretty resilient (I overhauled my website! Switched to an opportunity mindset!) but as my last day drew closer, unexpected feelings crept up on me.
Amongst the low-hum worry about finances and the future, the sudden sensation of someone pulling the handbrake on the car I was driving was discombobulating. Being abruptly reminded I was dispensable had me feeling a bit like a ghost. I’m wary of the capitalistic tendency to define ourselves by our jobs, but momentarily I wasn’t sure who or where I was.
I thought about those emotions multiplied on a global scale, held by millions and millions of people who have lost their jobs over the period of two years. A Large Hadron Collider of wildly unexpected, confused, often unarticulated feelings.
Just as we’re only at the very beginning of understanding the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the body, we’re also only starting to comprehend the mental health effects of two years of disruption, restriction and stress on the general populace. A recent Mental Health Foundation survey in Aotearoa found that 36% of respondents were experiencing poor emotional wellbeing; an increase of 27% from a year ago.
Often when we talk about ‘The Arts’ the term sounds rarefied, hollow, like something that happens in rooms we’re not a part of. But so many New Zealanders and those globally drew on culture, creativity and art in all its forms when faced with the mental load of a new pandemic and throughout the last two years.
The psychological potency of everyday acts of both receptive creative participation (consuming) and active creative imagination (doing) is undeniably compelling. Current and future discussions about national wellbeing recovery plans would be shortsighted to neglect it.
Like all of us, the uncertainty of the pandemic brought up anxieties and stressors for Moata Tamaira (Ngāti Tuwharetoa). Moata works in libraries in Ōtautahi and despite her world being books and reading being something she’s always enjoyed, the positive effects of reading on her mood wasn’t something that had always been at the forefront of her mind. “I knew that I liked reading, but I just hadn't made that connection.”
After becoming a parent several years ago, returning to reading helped Moata realise how good it felt, especially with “a brain that likes to worry about things a lot”. It was an understanding that she came back to during the tumult of the pandemic.
“I discovered that reading fiction is really good for me. It gives me a block of time where my anxious brain isn't thinking of all the things that are terrible and that's really helpful for me. I physically can't think about all of my concerns and worries when I'm focused on a character or a place or a setting. I can't do both things.”
Justice Hetaraka (Ngati Wai / Kāi Tahu) is a 23-year-old arts leader and educator in Whangārei. Tōhunga whakairo Te Warihi Hetaraka is Justice’s koro, and she grew up in a whānau environment where art and culture were inextricably linked to whakapapa and history. “I think that art and creativity and culture in all its forms – whether it’s music, visual, tactile – allows us to connect with our emotions. It has this beautiful ability to allow us to express them,” she says.
Alongside three collaborators, in 2019 Justice established HĀ, an education framework that uses art and creativity to transcend politics and help create safe, reflective spaces for teaching Aotearoa New Zealand history. During the pandemic, when Justice had to suspend her newly-created workshops in schools for HĀ, she found music was what she turned to the most.
“Music for me has been massive over the past two years. It was part of my life always, but it wasn't until Covid that I really went into it. I feel like it's a little bit of escapism, and it's meditative. You can just zone out.”
Like Moata, during the restrictions of the pandemic, Justice became more intentional and reflective about how and what she consumed, taking the time to explore different music genres. “Spending more time at home and alone, I think music has been a great way for me to personally just figure out who I am, and what I love, and what kind of things stimulate my brain.”
Sir Mason Durie’s oft-cited Te Whare Tapa Whā is a Māori framework for wellbeing. It has four dimensions: taha tinana, taha hinengaro, taha wairua and taha whānau. English is an imperfect linguistic conveyor of these concepts but they’re commonly translated respectively as physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, and family or social wellbeing.
While the first two dimensions are familiar in western health frameworks, the two latter dimensions are part of a wider Indigenous framework that reflects the importance of family and community connections and our deeper sense of self. Taha wairua is fundamental to hauora Māori. (‘Spiritual’ doesn’t necessarily map to ‘religious’. It can encompass identity, meaning-making, working out who we are).
When it comes to creative consumption, not only does art and culture help lift our mood and inspire, supporting our mental wellbeing, but the stories we read (and tell ourselves), the art we hang in our everyday environments, the music we listen to all contributes to a full, reflexive, articulated sense of self.
Art, culture and creativity reverberate off all four walls of Te Whare Tapa Whā. Especially those that have been historically ignored by western colonial interpretations of health and wellbeing.
In 2020, with the impact of Covid-19 making business no longer viable, impact producer and marketing maestro Anna Dean and her business partner Angela Meyer shut up shop on their infamous women-focussed marketing and PR agency Double Denim. Anna moved back home to Whakatū after many years in Pōneke and bought a home in Mohua (Golden Bay).
In her small home on a quarter acre section, she has rediscovered her personal art collection anew outside of its ‘city’ context. I asked Anna how it makes her feel, to have her art on the wall as she’s made a new life out of the city during the pandemic and what value that holds for her.
“It's the connection to the time, the memory, the relationship that enabled that work to be purchased or traded or found or gifted,” she says. Anna’s collection features 20 years of emerging Aotearoa artists from 2000-2020, with a focus on Pōneke. “So it's like a time capsule as well. And that's what I'm questioning now. Now that I'm in a different space, how do I actually consider my art collection now? And what is my relationship to it?”
The fundamental dimension of taha wairua is both self-reflexive and relational, connecting through past, present and future.
It’s not only receptive participation in art and culture that supports wellbeing in fractured, disjointed times, but Anna, Justice and Moata have each found themselves actively participating too – engaging their own creativity in fun, everyday ways.
“It sounds very Golden Bay but I have been doing some work with a somatic trauma therapist, which involves dancing,” Anna says. Every morning, she lets rip to three tracks. “It kind of changes the way that you walk out into the world and it’s so much fun. As a woman of my generation who was brought up to be a people pleaser, I have a real problem locating anger or getting angry. So I've been listening to Rage Against the Machine and punching it out”.
There’s also another space where Anna has found creativity. For the first time, she owns a garden and has realised a huge amount of creativity goes into the simple act of growing, and that it’s surprisingly collaborative.
“There's so much information sharing that goes on with seed or flowers,” she reflects, adding that it’s an interesting insight for those who may not be explicitly familiar with a creative mindset. When she chats with neighbours about sharing seedlings or plants, “it’s very much like an artistic collaboration between actors or writers or artists. And that's an incredibly beautiful thing.”
During the period after the first lockdown where life in Aotearoa went back to a sense of relative normalcy, Moata would meet once a week at lunch time with the waiata group at Christchurch City Council. Singing was a moment of active creativity that lifted her mood.
“There’s something about harmony. There’s something about the way your voice melds with a bunch of other voices and it just sounds and feels amazing. There's a sense of connection and being part of something. Which has been difficult through this period.”
“I feel embarrassed sometimes. I’m in my forties and it's taken me this long to figure out some of this stuff about myself. I’ve definitely got better at noticing what things make me feel good,” Moata says.
It’s a deeply relatable sentiment. So often we box on, responding as best we can to all that life throws at us, without listening to or understanding our own pleasure. Then come the sudden changes, ambiguity, and stress of the pandemic which converge to move us further away from connection, the moment, and beauty.
But everyday receptive and active creative acts help us to find inspiration, reflect, and connect. Most importantly, art, culture and creativity helps us understand our emotions, express those emotions, and articulate our sense of self in the process. (After all, yielding to feeling and moving through it is true resilience).
When we’re feeling weightless, like a bit of a ghost, art anchors us. It serves our spirit, feeds our wairua, and reminds us who we are.
This story is part of the Creative Wellbeing series, a partnership between Creative New Zealand and All Right? that shines a light on the transformative wellbeing and hauora benefits that arts, culture and creativity provide. You can read the whole series here.
