Founded by Fiona Rich, Spider Arts is a community arts education organisation that has been operating since 2008 offering community projects, events, murals and children’s arty parties.
Spider Arts aims to empower and inspire, whilst improving wellbeing and quality of life for participants through the arts. Its mission is to provide opportunities for people to engage creatively with others and realise their potential and that of their community by working together.
Since Fiona graduated from the MSc Art Psychotherapy course at QMU, she has been keen to incorporate therapeutic art programmes into the work that Spider Arts does. She was recently successful in her application to register Spider Arts as a SCIO- Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (August 2019) and now hopes to access financial support through grant funding to help realise her vision of creating a mobile art therapy unit in a decommissioned ambulance. This project is called the Calmbulance and will offer one-to-one art therapy and therapeutic drop-in sessions to primary school children. The model of delivery is designed to tackle one of the barriers to accessing this kind of help for primary schools, the lack of suitable space for such workshops.
