Creative Health Lab - Reframing Collections: Creative Health Disability and Post Colonial care

This participatory session explores creative health and wellbeing for disabled people, foregrounding post-colonial contexts and questions of power, access and representation. Drawing on practice developed in collaboration with people living with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), the session centres disabled lived experience as a critical lens through which museum relationships are rethought.

Participants will take part in a facilitated creative lab using selected museum objects (or replicas) guided by slowed-down, sensory and accessible methods that support cognitive difference, agency and care. Rather than prioritising authoritative interpretation the session invites relational encounters with objects where meaning emerges through memory, emotion, cultural resonance and embodied response.

The session critically examines how colonial legacies and institutional norms shape who collections are for whose knowledge is valued and whose bodies and minds are accommodated. By positioning disabled participants not as recipients of access but as co-producers of meaning, the session models equitable non-extractive engagement with collections.

Collective reflection will consider how creative health methodologies can support decolonial and disability-informed museum practice, offering transferable strategies for working with disabled communities across cultural contexts, including African diaspora groups. The session proposes care, creativity and interdependence as essential tools for rethinking museum relationships.