Helium Arts

Mission / Aims

Helium Arts is the national children’s arts and health organisation. Helium Arts is committed to nurturing and honouring creativity as a natural resource for a child’s wellbeing.

Helium Arts:

• supports a dynamic, child-friendly, family centred, holistic approach to children’s medical provision, within community, primary, and acute healthcare contexts.
• produces creative arts interventions for, with, and by young people which respond appropriately and adequately to their needs. Helium’s services are participatory and collaborative.
• works with highly skilled artists in residence to develop meaningful, arts engagements at a local level. They work with respect to the healthcare setting as a community, responding to patients, families, visitors, and staff and facilitating partnerships between departments.
• aims to uphold the arts and health field as a creatively charged environment with which artists can engage, where artforms can be challenged, enriched, and extended to produce ground-breaking, inventive new work which engages with the development of children’s arts in Ireland

Areas of activities

Helium Arts is currently progressing four creative programmes:

• The Artists in Residence Programme is a sustained engagement whereby an artist works with a healthcare community over a number of months. Since 2012, this programme has focused on teenagers in hospital.
• Helium’s Community Health Programme: Two Suitcases is an award-winning community film project for teenagers living with chronic illness. Running since 2012, teenagers collaborate with professional artists on developing and making their own films.
• Early Years: Since 2009, Helium Arts has brought creative projects to children aged 0-3 and their parents in a variety of health settings, including health centres, child development clinics, early intervention centres and community centres. Helium is currently working in partnership with the Jack and Jill Foundation on the Picnic Project, developing multi-sensory performance experiences for children under three with complex needs.
• The Professional Development Programme offers training and support to artists and healthcare staff wishing to engage in arts and health practice.

Artform(s)

Architecture, Dance, Film, Literature, Multidisciplinary, Music, Theatre, Visual Art