Artists
SUIT champions the use of creative practice in recovery, and many of our clients have worked to produce amazing portfolios in a wide range of mediums and styles. SUIT’s weekly art group is an accessible space for connection and creativity, with no pressure to come with previous experience of the arts. Our artists work with a range of community and arts organisations including Asylum Artist Quarter, the Wolverhampton Arts Centre, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Portraits of Recovery, and the Good Shepherd. These incredible networks provide limitless opportunities for creative practice in recovery and our clients can find enormous value, benefit, and purpose.
Wayne Taft
I feel like I’m not thinking about my addiction. Or I’m starting to think about it very differently…
Mentally. I don’t think I could have done recovery without the art. I think back, and think what would I be doing? Especially after I relapsed, I felt like I’d lost everything again. I lost all my creativity. I wasn’t interested one bit. SUIT encouraged me to join [P R O] F I L E working with Asylum Artist Quarter, and I don’t know where the enthusiasm and the spark to find my creativity has come from!
Recovery doesn’t even come into it now. All I think about is art. Asylum’s Corin and Hannah have been such an influence, so has SUIT’s Creative Arts Lead Christiane. They have shown me things I never thought of, opened my mind to how and what I can do.
Now I have a studio at Asylum which I’ve always dreamed of.
Everything has fallen into place, but none of this would have happened if I still had my poison: the drink. I’m doing so well now, thanks to everyone who has believed in me.
Stephen McFadyen (Scouse)
Photo by Neil Reading
Scouse is currently working with Asylum Artist Quarter, SUIT, Wolverhampton Arts Centre, and the Good Shepherd. He is part of Asylum Artist Quarter’s inspirational 9-month professional art school programme, [P R O] F I L E.
The art is keeping my mind away from using, and importantly keeping me away from the environment I was stuck in.
I go to art groups, use an art studio, visit galleries with others, and I paint at home. I’m really making an effort to find a better life, I’m trying, and I know people are seeing that
I love the trips out, and releasing my creativity by working on my story helps to deal with the difficulties I experienced to turn them into a positive for me and others to understand. I always felt different, and I was in prison for a long time which isolated me more when I came out. I’m happy I found art to help me to cope better.
Matt Lloyd (MattheArtist)
My works are not static images, but living negotiations between chaos and control, memory and myth, surface and soul…
Every mark is part of an ongoing ritual; a dialogue between the seen and the felt, the individual and the collective. In confronting celebrity, identity, and emotional trauma, my work captures something fundamental about being human in an age of spectacle.
In the studio, the gallery, or community space, creation remains an act of courage and communion. Paintings, sculptures, and collaborations are not merely aesthetic artefacts but acts of persistence; affirmations that meaning still matters, and that within the noise and glare of modern life, the quiet truth of the handmade gesture can still cut through.
John Webb
My own sense of what I can do has changed. I feel I can do anything now.
All the positive responses and the support from Christiane & Fallon at SUIT…I've been like a flower blooming… since I started SUIT’s art group last year it has made all the difference to me. Positive difference, self-esteem, confidence.
Isn’t it nice when you’re amongst people and when you speak they will now listen properly.
Sally Rowley
