FALLING down to illness and falling back up to recovery has inspired a collaborative art and wellbeing project in Dunfermline.

Run by Drew Walker, his father Rab, and his mother Liz, Falling UP Together, a registered charity based at Fire Station Creative, is open to anyone in need of a creative space to work on their art, and their wellbeing.

They are currently holding an exhibition, 'Outside-Inside', within the community gallery at Dunfermline Carnegie Library and Galleries (DCLG) while the art of the 79 people involved with Falling UP is also displayed in a container-studio covered in murals and in a pop-up Woodhenge exhibition at Calais Woods.

The family have also engaged pupils from Woodmill High School, with an aim to include students from their first days in secondary education, up to their final year.

"It was my subjective experiences of falling down to illness and then falling back up to recovery, that is where the name Falling UP came from," Drew told the Press.

"We don't ask people for their story and mental health problems, that's a private matter.

"We share our story with people when they first come in but they are not beholden to say now it's my turn.

"Some people do tell us but we are for people who are mentally healthy as well as people who have mental health conditions, it's a wide spectrum."

The charity grew as a way to bring the Austrian 'Gugging' process to Scotland, which formed the basis for Drew's PHD research between 2016 and 2020.

"The Gugging process, it's called," Drew explained.

"It's a former psychiatric unit and it's now a place which still has residents with chronic mental illnesses but they're platformed at a very high level within the art world and their art can sell for sometimes hundreds of thousands of euros.

"It's people who are all self-taught but don't have the chance to live independently because of their chronic conditions.

"The thing they have there is an open studio which means people from anywhere can arrange to go in and do some art alongside the world-famous Gugging artists.

"For them there's an importance in having the outside in so it's not a contained studio that is cut off from society."

He continued: "My life has become, since the doctoral studies, is to bring about a version of Gugging to Scotland that works for Scotland.

"Scotland is not Austria and vice versa, our systems and processes are different, but we want to create something that is an addition, not a replacement for things like art therapy and medical practices.

"We couldn't do their job just like they couldn't do what I suppose is the afterlife for people."

Drew's own recovery was heavily influenced by trips with his parents in the outdoors, where the family would collect deadwood and create structures and creatures.

Now Falling UP regularly works alongside Save the Calais Woods Wildlife.

"The importance of being outside meant that you could escape from feeling trapped indoors," he said.

"I started to work with people who were ‘artists but not artists’, some were medical professionals, some were self-taught.

"I got 12 people who didn't know each other at first but had all come through working with me.

"We set up an exhibition that was first shown at Fire Station Creative in December 2016.

"It was collaborative wholly as I had worked with each of the 12.

"Our idea was to look at the broad theme of art process, mental illness and recovery."

Since then, the project has developed into a registered charity, allowing Falling UP to receive funding.

Each participant, whether they attend regularly or prefer to work on their own, is given a space to create art and form relationships, both with the Walkers and other members.

The current exhibition is the eighth iteration since 2016.

Part of the growth of Falling UP has been involvement with Woodmill High School, where students have been given the hands-on opportunity to create art for display.

"What we didn't want to do was replicate what the schools were doing as a bolt-on activity, an addition that was just something brief that didn't have any longevity," Drew said.

"We wanted to be authentic to ourselves and we want the pupils to do something atypical to what they're doing already.

"We wanted to do something with S1 that would bring them into our process of creating ideas around creatures of the woods and imaginary creatures to let their ideas come through.

"My parents are retired high school teachers but for myself it is a new experience.

“The great thing is that it's learning through doing, that's what we try to encourage."

You can view work created by students and other members of the group for free at the 'Outside-Inside' exhibition at DCLG community gallery.

Rab, Drew, Liz, and other students are often available for discussion about the exhibition as well as Falling UP.