*Creative Partnerships* at EHD ’21: emerging trends in integrated art for healthcare
This year was another barnstorming success for the European Healthcare Design Congress, with over 1000 online attendees making it the most buzzing to date. I wanted to share Art in Site’s contribution to the conference, along with some reflections on the emerging trends in the world of integrated art and design in healthcare.
Art in Site (AiS) partnered up with NHS National Performance Advisory Group on Arts, Heritage and Design (NPAG) to deliver a four-day programme of events — featuring 27 speakers presenting international case studies and workshops — demonstrating the role of creative partnerships underpinning successful integrated art projects. We presented a daily “Arts & Health Hour”, and concluded with an extended workshop examining international case studies, along with a sensory exercise to ask how healthcare planning and policy can best capitalise on artistic approaches in the future.
I’ve collected some themes that came up for me across these sessions
- Art is putting children in control
- Artists bring artwork + ideology
- Art can deliver a strong promise of care
- Art gives a picture of the community
- The value of new emerging frameworks
1. Art is putting children in control
Once upon a time, children were “seen, not heard”. Now it seems, hospitals are at the vanguard of a cultural change: institutions are giving children control over their environment — through modes of expression, personalisation, and exploration.
Martin Jones (Director, Art in Site) and Liz O’Sullivan (Arts Manager, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust) presented artwork for Evelina 1+ — a new extension and refurb of nine departments where art and clinical needs are fused together. Notably, in Phlebotomy, a decorative cartoon strip gives children and families an engaging insight into the process of taking a blood sample. This reduces anxieties and fear of the unknown and speeds up processing time, putting children in charge of their journey and expectations. Crucially, this narrative is told through children, who explain to other children — a demystification of the service that puts them on the same footing as other adults. This sends out a message of child-empowerment that reinforces the patients autonomy in GSTT’s culture of care.
Similarly, in a presentation of Integrated art for Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital — a major new development in Sweden — Cristiana Caira (Senior architect, White Arkitekter) showed interactive artwork that enables children to take control, this time through an activation of the environment around them: by pressing a button, children set off a huge ball bearing, which careers round a mammoth ball track (the highest in the world!) in the atrium space, to the delight of families waiting below.
Control takes a slower, quieter tone in Sheffield Children’s hospital’s installation of a large interactive Colourwall by digital arts studio Megaverse, at the Safeguarding Support Unit. As discussed by commissioner Cat Powell (Head of Artfelt, Sheffield Children’s Hospital) and Jade Richardson, (Arts and Digital Commissioner, Sheffield Children’s Hospital), children coming to this unit are extremely vulnerable and will have suffered emotional, sexual, or physical abuse. The digital installation responds to an emotional need — for gentle, slow, responsive control — with hexagonal tiles, whose colour tones illuminate and morph, providing a calming, centring display as patients touch and apply pressure. It’s a crucial reminder that care, therapy, and recovery sometimes requires non-verbal beginnings, as a way to mindfully re-set a tone prior to entering a room for counselling or talking therapies.
Great Ormond Street Hospital’s new Sight and Sound Centre was showcased on day 1. It’s an absolute tour de force of artwork, and a masterclass in how to put children in charge (playfully). A key highlight — Oliver Beer’s hanging organ piece, in a main stairwell: as families walk up and down the steps, they trigger different notes in each of the organ’s pipes, creating a spontaneous, collaborative, embodied musical improvisation across floors. And what could be more empowering than the opportunity — in the words of David Byrne — the opportunity to “play the building”?
2. Artists are bringing “more than just artwork, they also bring an ideology”
This compelling statement came from Lucy Zacaria as she commented on the work undertaken to integrate art and interiors inspired by the work of Jospeh and Anni Albers at the Children’s Intensive Care Unit, St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Both Anni and Joseph were extraordinary teachers in their time, whose bigger ideas on colour and form shaped a generation of artists, and even some scientists. Lucy spoke about the need to immerse clinicians in their world, the Albers ideology. Clinicians visited their work at the Tate shows, they perused books, and communication and dialogue remained open between the design team, and the foundation, and staff. I was reminded that the more that clinicians are given a chance to immerse in the world of an artist, the more likely a project will gain a real momentum and positive collaboration from all sides.
Marie-France Kittler, Deputy Arts Manager, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, along with artist Sheefali Asija, presented an extraordinary project which puts a shared ideology at the forefront of hospital culture: in celebration of the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife, Asija is working with nursing staff to create proto-heraldic crests which celebrate and represent different wards. This is an opportunity for staff to collaborate with Asija in her practice, which has a longstanding artistic concern with the reinterpretation of symbols of power. This artwork gives expression and artistic power directly to nurses, and, at the same time, it sets out nuanced questions about history — patriarchal, colonial, institutional — and suggests a new way for our nurses to reclaim pride and recognition for their work. All that in one simple idea!
Elsewhere, colour “ideologies” — why not call it that? — were manifest in the presentation of artwork from Oona Culley and Jacqueline Poncelet, at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, Emergency Department Resuscitation ward. Poncelet provided a kind of re-choreographing of colours across all surfaces and furniture decisions, for patients moving through states of stress, delirium and consciousness. Her sensitive treatment comes from years of experience as an artist working across different public contexts, most notably in the work “Wrapper” at Edgware Road Tube station, which manifests as a kind of colourful, empathetic embrace of that locality — it’s machinery, it’s architecture, its multicultural demography….
3. Artwork delivers a promise of care through metaphor and language
The theme of wrapping also surfaced in our very first EHD’21 presentation: Art for Life at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust is working with lead artist Esther Rolinson on an art commission for Musgrove Park Hospital’s new Surgical Centre. Esther is creating artworks that will be integrated into the architecture and interior design, which fuse the physical with the digital to produce free-flowing forms that appear to enclose and embrace space. One of the doctors whom Esther spoke with remarked that these drawings seem to give patients a promise of being wrapped up, hugged almost within their journey — a reflection of the empathetic culture of care.
Bethlem Gallery was commissioned by South London and the Maudsley (SLaM) to develop an art programme to celebrate the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Through a co-design process the artist Sarah Carpenter worked with a group of nurses to create a collection of artworks for the hospital’s main entrance. In her talk Sarah introduced herself as an “artist-researcher” — such an interesting role! Featuring artwork of interlocking hands and forms, Sarah’s work reflects the “reciprocal” ideology of care — one in which patients return the care they have received in the form of gratitude, and thereby link hands, proverbially, as a larger service community.
4. Art gives a picture of the community
The Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children was designed by Stanton Williams to bring together scientific and clinical expertise. As presented by Vivienne Reiss, Co-Head GOSH Arts, along with Kalpesh Intwala, Associate Director Stanton Williams, art and architecture work in harmony to convey messages about the research centre, and its collaborative ethos. A great example is Mark Titcher’s ‘Together we can do so much’, an impressive eight-metre wood relief piece hovering between language and non-verbal expression:
“I wanted to make something that was connected to the larger themes in the Zayed Centre for Research — people working together, interaction and the interface of the building between the clinicians, staff and patients. I found a longer quote from [20th century advocate for disability rights] Helen Keller which is ‘Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much’. The second part of that really seemed to sum up the spirit of what is going on at the Centre.”
– Mark Titchner
Guy Noble, Arts Curator, UCLH Arts and Heritage led a conversation with artist Dryden Goodwin, along with colleague and artist Simon Tolhurst, to explore Goodwin’s myriad of portraits of patients, which adorn hanging banners and wall pieces in the new Haematology Centre in the Grafton Way Building. Goodwin’s style is to keep a line moving and wandering, to rescan over space until an image emerges — and this quality lends it a feeling of being sensor-like — as if Goodwin is himself a kind of human “imager” who lends an emotive human touch to the vital role of clinical “imaging” (the department which sits adjacent to his portraits).
5. New frameworks
Eleonora Fors Szuba (Public art project manager/ Teamleader, Region Västra Götaland) gave an insight into the artistic commissioning process in Sweden — explaining that 1% of the building budget is added to (not subtracted from) the construction value. This has been in place for decades, helping Scandinavian design to reach further and drive artistic innovation: Suba, along with Cristiana Caira, Senior architect, White Arkitekter presented artwork at Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital — a major new hospital in Sweden showcasing a transformation into a more urban-like hospital campus; and artwork for Södra Älvsborg Hospital, a Psychiatric Clinic with a humanist design aiming to de-stigmatise mental health (see also Lottie McCarthy’s article on Sad chairs). From bold wayfinding-art integration, to outdoor sculptures, to witty interactive sculpture and light-refracting installations… These examples of dynamic, integrated art are a reminder of how prescient and needed is a campaign to mandate a % for art in UK capital projects. It’s amazing what we achieve here in the UK without this financial earmarking — but imagine what could be done with support like that given to our Scandinavian friends?
Coming out of Bristol… a sensorial revolution is taking place! In our final presentation, Dr Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith, Bristol University, invited participants to take part in a creative exercise — a sample from the Sensing Spaces of Healthcare Project — a UKRI funded project led by Dr Victoria Bates (University of Bristol)– which invites designers, patients, and planners to rethink the NHS Hospital through sensory history & creativity. We were taken on a journey to imagine, map, and reimagine healthcare spaces in terms of their multi-sensory qualities. These exercises opened up my thinking in delightfully novel ways, and it broadened my sense of how we, as designers, can invite staff to come out of the everyday and reimagine a different future for their healthcare spaces, using sensorial, intuition-focused methods of engagement.
To see some of the responses from that exercise — see here:
https://en-gb.padlet.com/petershenai/7knshrdaqqdg0g4x
I hope that anyone that came to any of our programmed talks enjoyed themselves. We certainly did!
Extra info on Art in Site’s contribution to the EHD’21 conference:
Elsewhere, Art in Site presented our “wayfinding +” approach in a lecture from Director Louisa Williams, showcasing two decades bringing art and wayfinding together as a cohesive whole.
GOSH’s new sight and sound centre was showcased, which includes an art/wayfinding scheme from Art in Site that enables people to play their way to their appointment, via an interactive “dolls’s house” and set of illustrated characters, who lead the way.
And lastly, Art in Site were thrilled this year to pick up a highly commended award, for our work on Evelina London Children’s Hospital
Stay tuned for upcoming special features on these projects.
