REWIRE: Understanding Mental Health in the Visual Arts

Long install days. Compressed bump-ins. Funding rounds that feel like roulette. Studio politics. Solo practice that quietly blurs into isolation.

If you work in the visual arts, you’ve likely felt the pressure simmer beneath the surface.

REWIRE: Understanding & Supporting Mental Health in the Visual Arts is a free 90-minute workshop designed specifically for artists, curators, arts workers, producers and creative teams across the visual arts sector.

Led by psychologist Dr Ash King PhD from Support Act and a lived experience arts worker, this session speaks directly to the lived realities of visual arts practice in Australia.

Grounded in current research and real-world experience, the workshop explores:

• What is actually driving stress, burnout and mental health challenges in the visual arts right now, from precarity and project funding to public scrutiny and creative identity strain.

• The psychosocial hazards common across studios, galleries, institutions and freelance practice, and who tends to carry the heaviest load.

• How chronic uncertainty, rejection, high emotional labour and identity-linked work shape your nervous system, relationships and creative capacity.

Most importantly, you will leave with practical, psychologically informed tools to help you build a creative life that is sustainable, not just survivable.

Because art should stretch the imagination, not snap the artist.

Presented in partnership with NAVA.

Delivered with support from Creative Workplaces