A collaborative project, which has used art as a vehicle for exploring identity and emotions, has brought together multiple Nottingham organisations, a local author, young people and design students.

Joanna Lockwood, a Senior Research Fellow at Nottingham research centre Mindtech, took inspiration from her friend Ethan Sacks who works at Marvel within the comic book industry - who created a graphic novel series with his daughter to create a story that drew from her experience of depression. This creative process and the end result, the series ‘Haunted Girl’, helped her to explore and work through her experience. Seeing how powerful this approach was, Joanna wanted to see whether an art-based therapeutic initiative like this might be possible in Nottingham.

The final result of this project – a graphic novel called Crooked Seams, is currently part of an exhibition called The Art of Mental Stealth at The Institute of Mental Health, on the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus. The project was part-funded by Nottingham’s City is Lab initiative.

It has been a pleasure to help lead this project, to work with so many fantastic organisations and individuals, and to see the Crooked Seams graphic novel which has taken centre stage at our Art of Mental Stealth exhibition. This work has allowed the young people we worked with to explore their identities and emotions in a safe and accessible way. We hope that from the success of this project that we will be able to work alongside schools and community groups in the future to deliver this project with more young people or even to develop something like this as a short course intervention.

Joanna Lockwood, Senior Research Fellow at Mindtech

One of the projects partners, an education charity called Ignite Futures, received funding from UKSFN (Science Festival Network) which helped support the work. The theme of the funding was ‘making connections’ which also had a focus on funding for under-represented young people. Ignite utilised this funding to work with a Nottingham LGBTQIA+ youth space called Outburst.

Image credit: Emma Ford Photography

Melanie Wheeler, who was previously the Community Program Lead at Ignite Futures, Nottingham, said: 

Crooked Seams was such a collaborative project, it allowed us to build relationships with the young people at Outburst who were absolutely central to this project. It was great to see the young people grow in confidence whilst expressing themselves, and then also to see how proud they were of themselves and their work at the Art of Mental Stealth exhibition.

Melanie Wheeler, former Community Program Lead at Ignite Futures, Nottingham

Young people from the Outburst youth space worked with Nottingham-based writer and facilitator LP Mills to create characters and a storyline exploring identity, sexuality and personal struggle.

Taylen, one of the young people from the Outburst Youth Space and Crooked Seams contributor, said:

It was fun, I enjoyed it. Everyone had different ideas and perspectives, and it was great that we found good ways of working together and incorporating lots of ideas. I think as a group we found it a good way to express our ideas and creativity. Liam (LP Mills) was really understanding and he worked hard to ensure everyone’s voices were heard, that we all got chance to share, and that as many things as possible could end up in the final version of Crooked Seams. I’m really proud of what we all achieved together.

Taylen, Crooked Seams contributor

Nottingham-based Writer LP Mills facilitated sessions with the young people from Outburst helping take their creative ideas and experiences into character design and the story which became the Crooked Seams graphic novel. Speaking about the work, he said:

It was fantastic to be a facilitator for so many creative young people. Crooked Seams is a story of struggle, grit, exploration and identity. This project enabled the young people to more easily explore challenging topics than simply discussing them and the students from Confetti did an amazing job illustrating it.

LP Mills, Nottingham-based Writer

Once the characters had been designed and the story had been finalised, design students from Nottingham School of Art and Design’s Confetti campus were tasked with illustrating it.

Pete Abrahart, Lecturer and Module Leader on the ‘Industry Practice for Foundation degree in Graphics and Digital Design’ at Confetti Campus, Nottingham School of Art and Design, said:

A lot of our students had never worked on a comic or graphic novel before. Their ability to adapt, be flexible and take on new skills really shone on this project. Students fed back that they really enjoyed it and got to use different points of view and different ways of working. Our students loved the fact they were not confined by having to stick to traditional illustration styles and similarly to the young people from Outburst – were able to fully express themselves creatively.

Pete Abrahart, Lecturer and Module Leader at Nottingham School of Art and Design

You can read further details of The Art of Mental Stealth here. The exhibition will continue to run at the Institute of Mental Health until the end of March. For any enquiries to do with this project, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.