Dr Liz Stirling

Dr Liz Stirling is a creative practitioner using performance, collaboration, co- production and art activism to explore how we connect with each other. She has performed, published and run projects extensively in the UK including at Tate Britain, Tate Modern Summer School. Her practice explores the relationship between creativity, wellbeing and environment and more recently explores the human relationship to nature through the experience of outdoor swimming.

Dr Stirling is a founder member of the Art Doctors with artist Alison McIntyre, playfully breaking down barriers to participation in arts and culture and exploring the role of creativity in all our lives. The Art Doctors started with the British Art Show 8 in 2015/2016 and have worked across arts and wellbeing with a range of people and organisations across the North. They have worked closely with Chapel FM, Space2, Thackeray Museum, Leeds Museums and Art Gallery as well as social prescribers and health sector workers. They are interested in how creativity can positively affect wellbeing, growing feelings of connectedness and confidence through self-expression and community activity. Art Doctors are currently working with West Yorkshire Libraries on an ACE funded project co-producing kits for social tables in libraries where members of the public can explore their creativity in warm, welcoming hubs.

Dr Stirling has extensive experience of collaborative and co-production work, previously with artist Laura Robinson and as part of the feminist art collective F=. Dr Stirling is a founder member of F= based at Leeds Beckett University. F= embrace humour and playfulness in engaging people in debate around social issues, using spectacle as an invitation for collective action; ritual, public acts, burnings of symbolic objects, exhibitions, performances, pedagogic experiences and disruptive moments.

She has worked on a range of projects using play and non-verbal communication to engage in unique experiences with people across generations and backgrounds. This has often used performance employing mask, low-maintenance costumes and recycled materials to understand through humour and embodied experience the meaning of being a human, and other animals.

Robinson Stirling played and performed in the Tate Britain History Galleries and with teachers/art workers at the Tate Modern Summer School in and around the building and exhibitions. They ran an arts collective 105 Women with women asylum seekers in Leeds and East Street Arts, developing a collective space for learning and sharing creative skills in a safe, equal and social environment.

• Graphic Design