Living Well with Dementia: the IDEAL and A Life More Ordinary Projects

This free event will bring together two important strands of the Improving the Experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) programme: understanding the factors that can help people with dementia to live well and the role of creative arts in providing new insights into how people with dementia can live well. IDEAL is a longitudinal cohort of 1,547 community-dwelling people with dementia and 1,283 informal carers across England, Scotland and Wales established to investigate social, psychological and economic factors associated with living well with dementia. Prof Christina Victor will introduce the IDEAL project and discuss some of our findings. We will then be joined by the photographer Ian Beesley, one of the artists involved in our creative arts based `A Life More Ordinary’ project. He will show some examples of the images and poetry created during the project and discuss the impact it has had on the people with dementia, carers and other supporters who have collaborated with the artists.

Draft Programme 

1.15pm             Registration and lunch

2.00pm             Living well with dementia: overview of the IDEAL programme - Professor Christina Victor, Brunel University London

3.00pm            Tea/Coffee

3.20pm            A Life More Ordinary Project - Ian Beesley, Artist

4.30pm            Final remarks

5.00pm            Close

Ian Beesley is an award winning and internationally acclaimed artist. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including such venues as The National Media Museum, Bradford, the Peoples History Museum Manchester and the London international art fair. His work is held in the collections of the National Media Museum Bradford, The Royal Photographic Society, The V & A, London, The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, and the Imperial War Museum London amongst others. He has published over 25 books. In 2012 he was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. He was recently appointed reader-practitioner in visual representation at the University of Central Lancashire Preston and has just received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford for his significant contribution to arts and culture.

www.ianbeesley.com