Open Shelves: Empowerment through arts and crafts

Explore how arts and crafts can be used to empower different people through our collections in the General Reading Room.

Arts and crafts can help people focus on the here and now and distract them from everyday pressures and problems. 

Our new Open Shelves display, 'Empowerment through arts and crafts', is on until October.

Discover how creative activities can be used as a form of empowerment and a way of increasing empathy to understand others. The books featured in this display showcase how arts and crafts can promote awareness of health conditions and can contribute to our wellbeing.  

Come and explore how arts and crafting media from different countries can be used as a form of therapy and a way of expressing one’s own experiences of neurodivergence, disability, and mental health conditions.

These books show how marginalised people have found ways and means to express themselves in non-traditional techniques. This challenges the notion of what art is and who gets to be an artist, as well as looking at how such practices supports the wellbeing of many of us.

Some of the themes of the display include: 

• art and craft therapies and mindfulness;  
• The Outsider Art movement;
• mouth and foot painting; 
• neurodiversity and art; 
• arts and crafts from different countries.  

The display also includes some of our staff's own handmade arts and crafts!

Please note that you need to be a member of the Library to access this display. You can sign-up to become a member on our website.

About Open Shelves

Open Shelves is a changing display of reference material in the General Reading Room. A new theme is chosen every few months.

This space is dedicated to showcasing the range of our collections and being a source of interest and learning. Within it you'll find a range of books focusing on a theme that spotlights people who have historically been left out of such collections.