UK charity Hospital Rooms has a clear mission to improve the standard of living for mental health patients through art. Over the past six years, curator Niamh White and artist Tim A. Shaw have entered the tightly controlled rooms of the UK’s NHS buildings, collaborating with patients, doctors and artists at the top of Your Game, from Nick Knight. and Julian Opie to Anish Kapoor and Tschabalala Self.
White and Shaw started the charity after witnessing the austere clinic ward housing a close friend who had been hospitalized. His first project in Phoenix Unit in South West London, which helps people diagnosed with schizophrenia, brought together artists such as Gavin Turk, Sophie Clements and Knight. Since then, they have worked with more than 20 protégés and have partnered with the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth on a £1 million ($1.2 million) fundraising campaignwhich should end in 2025.
However, getting the attention of the worlds of health and art was not easy. “When we started, it took anywhere from 18 months to two years for someone to let us in,” White said. “It is a high-risk environment where some people are very ill. A lot of assumptions are made about the people in these services, what they can and cannot do. I think we’ve had a little hand in changing [people’s] opinions eventually entering these closed spaces.”
Hospital Rooms has just launched its latest project: the creation of 15 works of art for three wings of the Torbay Hospital in Devon. Two existing wings involved collaboration with patients and staff; the third, which is new, was conceived with the residents of the place. Participating artists include Anna Chrystal Stephens, Tom Hammick, Huhtamaki Wab and Simon Ripley.
“The Devon Recovery Learning Community put us in touch with people who have experienced mental health services or whose family and friends have too,” said Anna Testar, Senior Curator of the Hospital Rooms project. “We did workshops alongside those from the hospitals, building relationships with nurses, ward managers and occupational therapists.”
Tim A Shaw. Speakers Corner in Woodlands, a mental health unit that is part of the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. Image courtesy of Hospital Rooms; Photography by Damian Griffiths.
“In the past, we have been very focused on neighborhood communities,” White said. “Torbay is a unique place with its own culture and art scene. We wanted to understand more about the landscape and be a catalyst for future interventions.”
Hospital Rooms sits at a unique intersection between art and healthcare. The team has the freedom to work with patients and doctors as outsiders. “It means we can get to things in a different way,” Shaw said. “He doesn’t feed back into his therapy.” This gives patients some independence from clinical assessments, as being able to talk freely about challenging internal experiences is not easy for those being closely monitored.
“Someone on our team has had the experience of being in a mental health unit and has talked to dozens of people on the wards,” Shaw said. “Many fear that if they do express themselves genuinely, and it doesn’t come out as nice and flowery, it could affect the length of their stay, their treatment, and how they are viewed by psychiatrists.”
“We made it very clear that we are here to solve a problem and do something together,” White added. “We do not take notes from patients and nothing they do will be analyzed by anyone. It’s an egalitarian society.”
Julie Allan has been an art therapist for 30 years, most recently at The Hellingly Center—A psychiatric unit for those detained under the mental health law and who have also had contact with the criminal justice system. She first met White and Shaw in 2019, when Hospital Rooms brought in artists like Richard Wentworth and Sophie Clements to create artwork with patients.
“The role really is to help people express their darkness,” he said. “It’s very much about making sure I’m contained, safe and that I’ve built a relationship with someone. There is a fear among other mental health professionals that someone will come to art therapy and bare their soul and become very messy.” For Allan, art allows a connection to difficult inner feelings that conventional talk therapies might not be able to do. “I work with people who can’t talk about what they’re going through. Either they cannot express their feelings or they do not understand them. Art can help in the thawing process.”
Art and design are usually the last priority, not always due to lack of interest, but due to limited resources. This year, 13.8% of NHS funding it has gone towards mental health care, including for people with learning disabilities and dementia. Allan also mentions the lack of research on art therapy, which means that the benefits of such treatments have yet to be fully summarized in reports.
“We know it’s powerful, but especially in NHS settings, people want numbers and studies,” he said. “I would like to think that there is more acceptance in recent years, but that is not being [reflected in positions] created. Hospital Rooms has been incredible in promoting the healing power of art, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has also ruled on the matter.
Sophie Clements, games room at Phoenix Unit, part of South West London and St George’s NHS Trust. Image courtesy of Hospital Rooms; Photograph by Toni Hollowood.
According to Shaw and White, Hospital Rooms is being inundated with new project requests. While art is a low priority for overstretched teams, the chance to have someone else fix the problem seems to be appreciated. “I think there’s an inherited wisdom that if you don’t feel good in any way, you should be in a white environment,” Shaw said. “It feels cleaner; it’s easier to keep track of people. If you need to design something of value, you lose the skylight, the art, the special things that make it more than a cell. We can look at that like a mirror and say that it is inhuman. That’s helpful because people are used to the way it is.”
Recently, Hospital Rooms has participated in the design of two new units in Springfield University Hospital. Artists such as Larry Achiampong, Sutapa Biswas, and Yinka Ilori have worked with patients on the project. The initiative also includes input from teams from South West London & St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust, Norwich University of the Arts, WHO and Wandsworth Council, as well as various local cultural partners. “The Springfield buildings show a different way of doing things, with lots of light,” Shaw said. “Anna has also been working with artists in the new Torbay room to bring in stained glass.”
Hospital Rooms takes the communities with which it works very seriously. Some patients have won art awards and many have continued their artistic practice. All of this has happened in line with a shift in the creative world at large, where community-driven art is no longer considered less important. “If you were a community or participation artist, that was often considered much lower than other artists,” White said. “We want [elevate] the quality of everything that is associated with art and health. It is rigorous, it is valid; It’s just happening in different spaces.”
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