About

Artmoor Haven is a community creative hub promoting creative wellbeing based at The Clay Factory on the edge of Dartmoor and Ivyybridge.

It offers a variety of weekly, monthly and annual events for people of all ages to come and experience the benefits of creative living. These include a twice monthly 'Walk, Meditate, Create' date retreat, a monthly Art Playground with Creative Cafe, a weekly Art Club, a monthly Tech Club and support of community festivals.

It was set up as a non-profit community interest company by local artist and activist Jamila Hanan. Following an intensive decade campaigning to stop serious human rights abuses and coordinating crowded funded aid efforts to bring relief to survivors of genocide, Jamila turned to art, meditation and spending time on Dartmoor to help relieve accumulated trauma that was leading to burn out.

Realising the benefits of living a creative life, Jamila now wishes to share her methods with others, in the knowledge that finding time to regularly restore the body and mind helps people better deal with difficulties in work and life. In addition, she has found that connecting with creativity stimulates imaginative problem solving capacities.

Regarding choice of paint that she uses in the workshops, Jamila says, "I enjoy breaking the rules and experimenting with the combination of different mediums and love to see what happens when different people of all abilities come together to make collaborative artwork. I have found oil and cold wax to a perfect medium with which to express our feelings, due to its ability to hold texture, build up layers and discover beauty in the unexpected. When working with messy paint we are obliged to let go of our control and embrace our imperfections."

Jamila holds a certificate in Meditation and Mindfulness Teacher Training from the School of Positive Transformation and an MA in Fine Art from Arts University Plymouth.