Francistown — Thapong Visual Arts Centre is holding a week-long art workshop at Supa Ngwao Museum, for artists in the area.

Ivy Radipodi, an artist and official at Thapong, said that the workshop would explore the relationship between arts, notions of healing and questions of social responsibility.

Thapong wants artists in Francistown to benefit from this type of workshop like their counterparts in Gaborone have done. She said that it would also be an opportunity to establish themselves and cultivate contacts with other artists and institutions.

"We can use art to improve our well-being as Africans. Art is therapeutic as it can be used to assist in healing patients psychologically," she said.

"I am a painter, a sculpture and I also do ceramics, art helps me meditate, and it heals my illnesses by soothing my emotions. This is why I decided to share these experiences with other artists because body illnesses are not only physical they can also be emotional," she said.

Radipodi revealed that she worked with mentally ill patients in Cape Town, South Africa. "Out of 12 patients I worked with, four were discharged after working with the them using art as therapy," she explained.

Radipodi called for artists in Francistown to work with patients in hospitals like Nyangabwe to help them heal through art.

She said that this form of therapy is still new and people will pay attention to it.

The practical project will be contextualised in relation to existing examples of therapeutic and socially responsible art. It will be located within contemporary Botswana realities, with particular emphasis on diseases that are dangerous to our health. Radipodi explained that a distinction will be made between art that remains within the mainstream gallery context, with the content or message of social responsibility or healing. Art therapy will be discussed as an example of the latter and problematic according to its focus on the individual.

The project aims to give the artists a focused practical experience of working with art as a therapeutic and advocacy tool. At the same time, it hopes to draw on the artist's expertise to develop this tool as an 'art product' suited to a specified set of requirements of the organisation within which is used.

Radipodi said that all the artists would be required to make their own book, based on the example of her existing research book format. She further said that artists would be required to develop visual material of Body Maps revolving around findings and image making in the form of illustrations and artistic presentations visually.

"This would help the patients understand the form of illness they suffer from and even come to terms with living with the illness," she said.

Body maps are also used to evoke feelings and thoughts that the patients carry about their particular afflictions and possible solutions.

"The issues relate to the therapeutic process, but the findings are also central to the finished artwork, these completed products in fact form a significant part of the therapy, for the patient to keep and re-read and perhaps share his/her experiences with others," she said.