We Hold What We Carry

Co-created with women with lived experience, We Hold What We Carry, traces shared experiences of resilience, identity, trauma, and belonging. Developed by the Mental Health Foundation’s Elevate project and the Hope Campaign, which aim to ensure that people seeking sanctuary have a voice in decision-making and presented as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival under the theme Comfort to Disturb, the exhibition explores how creative practice can open space for dialogue, recovery, and collective reflection.

Using storytelling, video, found objects, and mixed-media installation, the work surfaces memories and cultural symbols that express both the fragility and tension of living between places. Each contribution a gesture, an object, a story holds traces of migration, adaptation, and the intimate work of rebuilding home.

The installation invites visitors to slow down, listen, and respond. It becomes a space where marginalised voices are centred, and creative expression becomes a form of dialogue, care, and resistance. By transforming lived experience and everyday emotion into shared reflection and asks how we hold what we carry and how, through art, community, and collective care, we might reimagine belonging across borders and difference.

Coordinated by Maryam Razeghian and presented as part of SMHAF.

Opening

Join us for an opening on Tuesday 4 November, 5.30pm – 7.30pm.

SMHAF 2025: Comfort & Disturb

Our theme, Comfort & Disturb, references the famous Cesar A Cruz quote that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. It is a simple expression of the power of art both to challenge and to console, often having a transformative effect on people and societies. The theme was collectively chosen by SMHAF’s team of regional coordinators, along with the arts team from the Mental Health Foundation. Across Scotland, hundreds of programme events have been developed in response to this powerful theme.