Meditative Drawing for People with Dementia and their Care Partners

MinDArt, a new group programme of drawing sessions that combine the principles of maintaining fine motor skills with the meditative qualities of drawing on paper and digital tablets. MinDArt was specifically designed for people with dementia and their care partners. It comprises of eight weekly 90-minutes sessions. The programme was user-tested (and subsequently modified) with a group of eight care partners of people with dementia between July and September 2019. We are now ready to pilot test this dual care programme with a group of people with dementia and their care partners. Each MinDArt session involves 90 minutes of exploring basic repetitive drawing gestures through different mediums such as pencils, felt tip pens, stickers, paint, sand, lengths of wool and a tailored digital drawing application on a tablet. Each session starting with a welcome and ending with a round up discussion. A document with a more detailed description of the 8 sessions is also now uploaded. There are 8 participants and the participants are invited to give feedback on the activities being explored. In week 4 there is a pair activity of painting together. The people with dementia will be in a room adjacent to the room being used for the care partners session. The session will be run by a fine arts university lecturer and a dementia advisor from Dementia Wellington. Attendance will be taken and there will be constant supervision for all activities.