Creative Health Before the Framework: A Conversation with ROM
Insights from her practice at the intersection of art, healing, and cultural knowledge in Lagos, Nigeria, where creative health exists as lived practice rather than formalized infrastructure.
I recently attended a webinar by Daisy Fancourt, author of The Art Cure, which I mentioned early this week in my review of that new book. What I loved most about that webinar was actually all of the other amazing people who attended. The chat was active, there was a great QA and I was motivated to reach out to a few people in the Creative Health field whose work really inspired me. One of those people was ROM.
Rebecca Obiageli-Madu (ROM) is a visual artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of identity, resilience, and empowerment, particularly through the lens of women’s experiences. Her ongoing trilogy, 70 Years of Music in Nigeria, examines the visible and invisible architectures that shape cultural influence and creative sustainability. ROM was a GlogauAIR resident from January to March 2025 and uses art as both personal practice and community outreach, particularly with orphanages.
I really love the work she’s doing visually as well as the articulation of the importance of this work. ROM’s perspective offers essential insight into how creative health exists and functions outside Western institutional frameworks. I had the opportunity to send her some interview questions and she has responded to the themes in the short essays below.
Writing by ROM:
all writing below has been provided by ROM …
Creative Health Before Frameworks Exist
“Creative health, in my context, did not begin as a field or a framework. It began as practice.” - ROM
In Nigeria, creativity has long functioned as a form of health without needing to be named that way. Art lives inside ritual, prayer, storytelling, music, embodiment, and communal gathering. It appears at moments of grief, transition, celebration, and survival. It is not something accessed through institutions; it is something inherited through living.
Because there is little formal arts-in-health infrastructure here, the work does not arrive as an intervention or program. It arrives as a necessity. You create because something in you, or around you, requires movement. You paint because there is pressure in the body. You gather because isolation would cost too much.
Practicing creative health outside institutional frameworks means that art is not separated from daily life or delegated to specialists. It is not framed primarily in terms of outcomes or evidence. It is relational, embodied, and often collective. The central question is not “Does this help?” but “Can we continue?” Can the person keep breathing, keep showing up, keep bearing what they are carrying?
At the same time, the absence of formal structures creates vulnerability. Without policy, funding, or continuity, much of this work remains invisible or unsupported. This is where tension lives for me: how to honor cultural practice without romanticizing the lack of infrastructure, and how to build language and visibility without reorganizing the work out of recognition.
If I were to imagine creative health support from scratch, I would want something hybrid. I would borrow from formal systems that sustain practice, resources, documentation, continuity, care for the practitioner, while fiercely preserving what already exists: embodied knowledge, spiritual intelligence, slowness, communal witnessing, and the right not to explain everything.
Creative health here does not need to be imported. It needs to be listened to more carefully.
Art as Spiritual and Psychological Technology
When I describe art as spiritual and psychological technology, I’m not speaking metaphorically. I mean that art does something.
It reorganizes attention.
It alters internal states.
It gives form to pressure that would otherwise remain diffuse or overwhelming.
Art allows transformation without requiring resolution. It can hold contradictions without forcing clarity. It can move energy through the body without demanding narrative closure.
This understanding shifts how I think about wellbeing. Rather than asking whether art produces measurable outcomes, I’m interested in what capacities it builds: the ability to stay present, to metabolize intensity, to remain in relationship with oneself and others under strain. Art, in this sense, is less about healing as repair and more about regulation, endurance, and re-patterning.
Spirituality enters here not as belief but as function. It is embedded in repetition, ritual, attention, and breath. It operates whether or not it is named.
Invisible Architectures
While the trilogy depicts people, my primary subject is not individual figures but the conditions that make visibility possible or impossible.
I’m interested in infrastructure, formal and informal, the systems of access, anonymity, circulation, and power that determine who is seen, who is sustained, and who disappears. The Ghosts of the Dark Web sits at the center of this inquiry for me because it reflects how influence often operates: quietly, indirectly, without spectacle.
When I paint these invisible architectures, I’m thinking about health structurally rather than individually. I’m thinking about what it costs to remain creative over time, and how systems, rather than personal resilience alone, shape that possibility. The paintings usually arrive before the language. The thinking clarifies itself through the act of making.
Legibility Without Thinning
I want the work to be legible across contexts, but not at the cost of its intelligence.
Translation is necessary, but it is never neutral. Some things survive translation; others refuse it. I protect what refuses by keeping it embodied, by letting it remain in practice rather than explanation, and by resisting the urge to over-contextualize for comfort.
Opacity, at times, is not a failure of communication but an ethical choice.
Embodied Knowledge
My relationship to mental health and creative practice has shifted over time. During the pandemic, art functioned as a stabilizing practice when other structures fell away. That relationship no longer defines my work. What began as survival has become discipline, language, and a way of thinking.
Resource scarcity has shaped my imagination, but I resist romanticizing it. Scarcity teaches certain skills, but it also extracts a cost. It is not a virtue, and it should not be mistaken for a prerequisite for creativity.
What I trust most now is embodied knowledge: what repetition teaches, what the body learns through sustained practice, what becomes evident only through time. Much of this knowledge is difficult to quantify, but it is precise.
I hope that you have enjoyed, and learned from, the words ROM has so generously shared here. If they’ve gotten you thinking about Creative Health, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. This work thrives when we stay in conversation about it!
ROM is a friend of mine and I'm so proud of her, reading these words and ideas she graciously shared here has added something positive to my mindset
This resonated with me. Thank you for such a thoughtful and reflective piece.