Stay, You Matter. Tan Y Maen

art and wellbeing • charity partnership • children and young people • workshop design and delivery • community coproduction • teaching and learning • mural design

Tan Y Maen are a charity providing mental health services at a community level across the South Gwynedd area in North Wales. The team approached me to get involved with the launch of ‘Stay, You Matter’ - a suicide awareness and prevention project. I was asked to work with representatives from local community groups and colleges to coproduce a design for a mural. I decided that the community mural should be hopeful whilst also representing the people who live there.

I wrote a series of 9 prompts that would invite discussion about how to get the most out of life, and what makes life worth living. Questions such as ‘what is a memory that makes you smile’, ‘what is your favourite thing about where you live’, and ‘how do you cheer yourself up when you’re feeling down’ led to written and visual responses from participants. Each contribution was added to a draft design, which I took away to illustrate and present as a final outcome to the group.

The final design represents the conversations we had as a group around positive mental health. They said their Welsh heritage and language was an important for their wellbeing, and they gained a lot of joy from the beautiful local surroundings. They also agreed that there was a good sense of community, with friends, family, pets and wildlife all making them feel happy.

It was really inspiring and life affirming to work with Tan Y Maen and their community partners, and it was a privilege to take the ideas of the participants to create a visual representation of what makes them happy.

I will involve the group in helping me to paint the mural in Tan Y Maen’s new premises later in 2025.