Steadying the Mind

Three Regional WA Artists Supporting Mental Health

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we spoke to three artists working across regional Western Australia who are responding to their environments through creative practice. Through printmaking, storytelling, and time spent in nature, each is finding ways to shift attention away from the churn of the mind and back towards something steadier.

Living and working regionally can shape both creative practice and wellbeing in distinct ways. Distance, landscape, and community all play a role in how people experience and care for their mental health – often calling for resourcefulness, connection, and new ways of finding balance.

Across Australia, rates of mental illness are similar in regional and metropolitan areas, yet access to care can be up to five times lower outside major cities. Suicide rates climb with remoteness, in some areas reaching double those of their metro counterparts. The reasons are layered and familiar, with isolation, financial strain, distance to seek healthcare, and stigma all adding to the tension. For many, support comes piecemeal: a local GP, a visiting service, or increasingly, a screen.

In this context, creative practice can offer not just expression, but a way to ground, reflect, and reconnect. The following artists show how these everyday acts of making can become quiet, steady forms of support.

Francesco Geronazzo

I first met Francesco Geronazzo as a student in one of his classes, though nobody called him that. To us, he was Franky. At the time he was also a pizza chef at one of the local breweries. Such is the nature of regional towns – you’d see Franky pop up here there and everywhere, and wherever you saw him, you could talk about anything. Something small, or something really big and philosophical. Whatever it was, you’d leave feeling somehow steadier and a bit lifted.

So it didn’t surprise me to learn Franky’s latest teaching gig was behind a fence line near Pinjarra, running a printmaking class inside the Educational Department of the Karnet Prison Farm. I could see that his patient, attentive and unhurried manner would do good things there.

Franky trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and later lectured in Italy before finding his way to Margaret River. In Australia, he worked as a printmaking technician, producing editioned works for the famed Leon Pericles, a role that demanded precision and a certain humility of hand. Over time he built a practice that blends studio work with teaching.

Working at the Karnet Prison Farm, Franky can see the benefits for his students’ mental health. He describes printmaking as a therapeutic process that is tactile and sequential. “Unlike painting, where every mark is direct, printmaking allows you to step through the process because of the indirect approach,” he says. For the men in his class, that seems to matter because the focus that the artform requires and the repetition or the slow building of an image can be quite calming.

Franky is careful not to call it therapy though. “It’s a class,” he says pragmatically. In the early weeks of his class, some students tested the edges, arriving loud and flirting with disruption. But over time, the cadence of the classroom has changed with fewer theatrics, more questions and longer stretches of quiet concentration.

And when you concentrate, the mind relaxes and quietens its own buzzing preoccupations. It becomes present and engaged with exactly the task at hand.

“Freedom” is not a word often associated with a place like Karnet, yet within the constraints of the classroom, a different version of it emerges. Freedom of creative expression. The men choose what to make, how to begin, which colours to use. They can take a risk that does not carry the usual consequences, and discover that an unwanted mark can become the start of something else.

What Franky has come to understand is that the skill he’s sharing gives people – whoever they are – a way to steady their minds. For those carrying trauma, shame, or the weight of uncertainty, it offers a quiet focus and control.

Over time, the lessons and the sequential patterns of printmaking, has become rhythmic and habitual. And perhaps the value sits in this rhythm, and the capacity to return to the work, to the moment, and, occasionally, to a steadier version of one’s own mind.

Sadie James

If you’ve travelled to the Coral Coast you may have seen Sadie James’ murals. They pepper the streets of Carnarvon and Exmouth and are unified by an unmistakable blue that reflects her enduring affinity with the Ningaloo reef.

Sadie James lives and works in the Gascoyne, in a landscape that is both stunning and isolating in equal measure. That tension sits below almost everything Sadie creates, and she toggles effortlessly through mediums; painting to short stories to film. But her underlying interests nevertheless overlap. She has a clear fascination with how to effect change concerning our wellbeing, and sees art and the coastal environment as healing pathways towards peace.

For Sadie, questions around mental health and grief became personal and unavoidable when her mum developed Alzheimer’s. She watched the decline happen in all its cruel forms, and then it ended in what Sadie says felt like slow-motion. The aftershock was not only grief, but a kind of temporal dislocation. That strange sense that time has slipped out of joint. When you are mourning, the world keeps moving at its normal speed, but you do not.

So to keep herself steady, she has been developing a platform to help others navigate the difficult times. The Blue Blanket is a project that has grown from her grief and the isolation of living in a regional place. It is a loose, evolving entity that includes an art exhibition, ‘Postcards from the Edge’, which explores the mental health challenges of regional life, two films, ‘Salt Medicine’ and ‘A Tail of Regret’, and community workshops that use art as a form of healing. It is less about ‘therapy’ in the conventional sense and more about creating conditions for people to respond to art, engage in conversations about wellbeing, or turn to creative practice to form connections.

Sadie came up with the name The Blue Blanket through her love of snorkelling. “I describe snorkelling like being hugged, like being wrapped in a blue blanket” she says, “because with the blue blanket of water around you, you have a break from your own gravity and heaviness. As opposed to feeling like you’re having to hold yourself the whole time.” Something happens when you submerge into a world where clocks don’t tick, and phones don’t ping. Being underwater is very much about embracing the present. “Snorkelling also forces you to hear your own breathing,” Sadie says. “There can be panic at first, then a slowing, then the mind gives itself over to whatever is directly in front of it.”

After her mother’s passing, Sadie published the children’s book, The Bubble. It tells the story of a parrot fish who creates a protective bubble to sleep in, then struggles to leave it after a nightmare. It’s a simple premise, but it holds a recognisable truth about bubbles as a form of self-protection. They are a place of retreat, but if we’re not careful, they can be difficult to come out of. The book has resonated widely, with both children and adults, and has quietly contributed to conversations around grief and mental health, while raising funds at its launch for dementia support.

By most measures, Sadie’s stories have found their audience. Along with two other published books, her work has been shortlisted for the Crichton Award, and she has sold more than 10,000 copies. But her own measure of success sits further ahead in time. Sadie hopes that by the time a child reading her book now reaches the age her mother was, Alzheimer’s treatment will be better understood and managed. Dementia currently remains the leading cause of death for Australians, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and continues to be one of the more complex and poorly understood conditions affecting the mind.

Set against the scale of a growing mental health crisis and the quiet erosion of the natural world, Sadie’s work might seem small, but in regional Western Australia, her murals, writing, and films carry weight in the community. Whether through her own impressive resilience or the enduring love from her late Mum, Sadie persists in her work. And for anyone lucky enough to know Sadie, or be exposed to her art, there is joy in that persistence.

Belinda McCawley

Belinda McCawley’s work sits in that sweet spot between meditation and creative practice. Under Mindful in Nature, Belinda runs guided forest therapy walks, nature journaling workshops, and deep ecology experiences that use creativity as a bridge back to the body.

“The work started from my own personal journey of stress and grief,” Belinda says. “I turned to mindfulness and nature to help me through that time and I just discovered how remarkable it was for my own mental health that I just wanted to be able to share it with other people.”

Based in the South West, Belinda takes people into the bush and along the coast and gets them doing what modern life often trains you out of. Things like slowing down, paying attention, and taking time to ‘notice’. These are modest instructions, but they run counter to a culture organised around speed and fragmentation.

Her background in environmental science, combined with training in psychology, gives the work a dual framework that is experiential but also informed by research. The physiological responses she describes – things like reductions in cortisol, lowered blood pressure, an observable lift in mood – are well documented, but she is equally attentive to the smaller, less formal indicators. Yawning, for instance. “People often associate yawning with being bored or tired,” she says. “But usually it means that you’re just starting to relax.” It is the body’s quiet signal that the nervous system is shifting states, moving away from vigilance and towards rest.

Her practice has received external validation including being named a finalist in the FACET Tourism Awards and winner for a Sustainability Award from the Joondalup Business Association.

For Belinda, nature connection is a meditation but also a creative practice. “I call myself an artist,” Belinda says. “And I’m a creator. I create experiences.” That creative thread runs through everything she offers, from guided journaling prompts to deep ecology practices that invite people to “speak from a non-human perspective.”

It is also place-based work. Belinda feels place before leading others into it, returning again and again until it feels known. As Belinda puts it, “It’s like getting to know a friend,” and it shapes how each experience is held. For participants, this translates into a more grounded experience, one held not only by the facilitator, but by the environment itself. For Mental Health Awareness Month, Belinda’s message is simple; “Give yourself permission to be.” Step outside and sit long enough for curiosity to return. Then write a few lines, draw what you notice, and let the body connect with your surroundings.