Therapeutic Landscapes aims to bring together people who are working across art, research, health and folk culture.

From the beginning, we wanted to find out who else was working in this space, and the response to the first call for papers confirmed that the community was there, waiting for somewhere to gather.

That sense of connection, and the collaborations and conversations the first symposium made possible, is as important as anything that happens on the programme.

There are ways of thinking about creativity, landscape and well-being that don't always fit neatly in conventional academic or professional settings.

Ideas about ritual, enchantment, magical thinking, and the folk cultures that carry them tend to sit awkwardly in institutions built around different assumptions.

Therapeutic Landscapes makes deliberate space for those ideas as legitimate and valuable ways of engaging with the world.

Participation in the arts, whether that’s making things, performing, gathering, or being in nature, has measurable positive effects on well-being.

At the same time, the NHS cannot meet the scale of current mental health need, particularly among young people and rural communities.

Therapeutic Landscapes sits within the broader creative health movement, bringing together artists, researchers and health practitioners to explore how creative and participatory practice can help to address these public health challenges, without making clinical claims, but taking seriously the evidence that engagement with the arts, landscape and folk culture can be genuinely transformational.