Healing Art: How Art in Hospitals Promotes Healing

Featured in: Healing Art: How Art in Hospitals Promotes Healing, edited by Isabel Grüner in collaboration with the Robert-Bosch Hospital, Avedition Gmbh, 2019

Text by Catsou Roberts, Director of Vital Arts

Hospitals are key civic spaces that form a crossroads of human activity. From traumatic incident to incidental prescription collection, these large municipal buildings serve a vast, diverse public who, in their thousands, daily pass through—whether arriving on foot, wheelchair or stretcher. Vital Arts views hospitals as important community spaces which are ideal to introduce new audiences to the transformative power of art. The public nature of hospitals, which are never emptied of possible viewers, affords an opportunity to provide a service of wellbeing that goes beyond the strictly somatic.

Vital Arts is the arts organisation for Barts Health NHS Trust, charitably funded to deliver art projects that enhance the hospital environment and, in turn, improve the patient experience. We offer patients, staff and visitors a cultural encounter—that often proves inspiring and mind-opening—which they might not otherwise access, thus making their time within hospital more positive. Founded in 1996, the organisation has developed an international reputation for producing ambitious and pioneering art programmes that encourage interaction with contemporary art by some of the most significant artists of our time, including Darren Almond, Hurvin Anderson, Cornelia Baltes, Ruth Claxton, Hannah Collins, Jacob Dahlgren, Ella Doran, Ruth Ewan, Tom Gauld, Roger Hiorns, Peter Liversidge, Morag Myerscough, Cornelia Parker, Amalia Pica, Lemn Sissay, Bob and Roberta Smith, Tatty Devine, Richard Wentworth, Catherine Yass, among many others.

Along with commissioning permanent visual artworks, Vital Arts also produces an innovative Participation Programme which brings music, dance, poetry, film, literature, performance and craft into hospitals, directly to patients. These creative projects assist clinical goals—by building spatial awareness and fall prevention through movement, for example, or increasing oxygen uptake with lullaby-singing sessions in neonatal care units, or engaging isolated elderly patients through theatre performance. They are usually delivered in partnerships with other cultural organisations, such as the London Symphony Orchestra, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, National Portrait Gallery, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, Akademi, and Artangel. Other projects involve gardening, life drawing, cookery, interactive digital art, and sound work.

Vital Arts also stages exhibitions, runs an artist-in-residency programme, and builds and manages an extensive art collection. Additionally, we produce and sell limited edition artworks to generate revenue, which is vital because the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) does not pay for the art that we bring into the hospitals; we need to secure funds  for each project we devise.

We rarely acquire existing work; our projects are site-specific and born of research and a long engagement with the hospital context. Central to our mission is selecting artists who have not previously made work for hospitals—and quite often have never been commissioned. As such, we take artistic risks knowing that the outcomes are not always predictable. Yet, we understand this is essential to generate significant work, that not only contributes to the redefinition of public art, but also creates patient-responsive projects that uplift hospital visits. The intensity of involvement, the scope of ambition, and working in such a determined and complex context frequently pushes artists into new creative territories, and yields original and unanticipated results.

Arts and Health is a growing field and there is increasing evidence of the benefits that exposure to meaningful and thoughtfully selected art has on reducing stress, decreasing the use of analgesics and accelerating recovery. Florence Nightingale, the social reformer and founder of modern nursing, is oft-cited for her belief in the positive effects of “variety of form and brilliancy of colour” as an “actual means of recovery”. Penned in 1859, this observation forms an important basis for the advocacy of arts in health. It is, however, critical not to constrain the understanding of art to a collection of formal properties, disassociating it from the cerebral elements and concepts that drive art (nor disregard those art forms without a visual manifestation).

People tend to be in hospital unwillingly, where they might encounter art unwittingly. In a clinical context, art does frequently function to distract patients, yet along with piquing interest, it should attempt to open horizons. Rather than argue merely for the inclusion of art in hospitals, the discourse needs to shift to an argument for art in hospitals that is distinguished and ground breaking. Ideally, every hospital would have an in-house team of art professionals who are trained in art history and critical theory, and who are deeply engaged with contemporary art, research and curatorial practice. Ideally, each team would forge new perimeters, and commission site-specific works by artists not found in other hospitals, thus offering patients, and their wider hospital communities, programmes that are inventive—and distinctive. This, ideally, to ensure that each artwork is unique to the individual hospital producing it.

This is possible through carefully developed curatorial strategies that respond to a hospital’s location, the services and treatments those patients are accessing, and of course, the demographics of particular patient groups. Many of our patients hail from disadvantaged and intensely urban communities. Anodyne images of sailboats bobbing on the water, or cows grazing in the pastures would likely engender a sense of disenfranchisement, rather than comforting familiarity. Curatorial strategies must also take into account the ways patients occupy a given space—ambulant through the corridor; confined in an isolation ward; supine in bed—as well as anticipate if patients might be anxious in a treatment room; bored at a dialysis machine; distressed in a counselling office; irritated in a waiting area.

The artists commissioned by Vital Arts often draw on clinical expertise and collaborate with staff and patients. Ruth Ewan, for example, working closely with Dementia Specialists, created a set of flash cards based on interviews she held with older adult patients, most of which were raised in London’s fabled East End. The patients spoke about their lives and summoned tales of work, love, leisure, family and war time. Ewan paired their stories with historic images gathered from several public archives. These flash cards, in use in the wards, are proving a successful tool for Occupational Therapists to trigger reminiscence and encourage conversation with Dementia patients who tend to withdraw and grow reticent.

Some commissioned artists elect to delve into the history of a hospital and its neighbourhood. This was especially true during the redevelopment of the Royal London Hospital and St Bartholomew’s (Barts) which saw the closure—and eventual demolition—of several redundant buildings and the construction of new large edifices with swaths of stark clinical spaces. Peter Liversidge, for example, spent months studying the history of the Whitechapel area surrounding the Royal London. The resultant work is a series of 66 typed proposals that offer a range of suggestions—from the impractical (build a dodgem arena) to the poetic (wander in the breeze) to the feasible (publish a book of jokes collected from hospital staff to be circulated to patients) — the latter of which we hope to produce.

For his commission, Roger Hiorns consulted the Trust’s Chief Archivist, sifted through our museum collections, and scoured a condemned Edwardian building in search of items to subject to his signature crystallisation process. After several days prowling the evacuated offices, redolent of the abandoned Mary Celeste, Hiorns alighted upon several clocks which formed the basis of his installation for the brand new fifteen storey building of the Royal London Hospital. The series of clocks, encrusted in blue crystals, are distributed along a corridor leading to the Operating Theatres, where the suspension of time, as captured by the corroded clock faces, is a critical factor in recovery.

Other artists we commission might choose to mine the Trust’s extensive archives, as did Richard Wentworth who produced a series of sculptures featuring historic photographs of scientific inventions and medical equipment, paired with antiqued mirrors, encased in heavy walnut boxes.

A different kind of engagement was undertaken by Ella Doran who designed furniture surfaces and privacy curtains for the Children’s Hospital at the Royal London. As well as consulting medical staff and young patients, she worked closely with the procurement team within the Trust to provide an alternative to conventional interior clinical design. Given the paucity of wall space within wards, the curtains become a perfect vehicle to carry a panoramic design that envelops the patient. An array of friendly elements—cats, rabbits, origami sail boats, flowers, kites—are montaged onto an image of the Thames in central London, proposing a dreamy, magical version of the city that awaits outside the hospital. The intelligent re-deployment of the design across bedside furniture creates an immersive environment.

Morag Myerscough, who has undertaken several projects with Vital Arts since 2012, also realised an integrated project with intensely coloured geometric tiles which completely re-line the original white walls of the entrance to the Children’s Hospital. Her spectacular work includes an resplendent LED sign with shifting kaleidoscopic patterns and a welcoming text that changes throughout the day.

At Barts Cancer Centre, Vital Arts similarly commissioned work built into the fabric of the building with back-lit photographs set into the ceilings of Linear Accelerator Suites. Patients required to lie very still while receiving radiotherapy can focus on overhead works by Simon Patterson, Susan Derges, Sophy Rickett, or Darren Almond. Almond also provided a sweep of fifteen of his stunning Fullmoon photographs that run throughout the waiting area—perhaps one of the most comprehensive installations of this series on permanent display.

While being enclosed in the lead-lined, bunker-like rooms for several minutes can seem very long indeed when treated with radiotherapy, there are areas where patients are confined for several days, sometimes weeks, for which we especially commissioned works that unfold slowly over time. Amalia Pica made a series of 65 ink stamp drawings for the corridor and isolation rooms of an oncology ward. These joyful works transform mundane rubber stamp markings into quirky images that withstand hours of scrutiny. Clustering these into groups of three engenders a dynamic interaction between them.

Also deep within isolation rooms is a project by cartoonist, Tom Gauld, for the Cystic Fibrosis Unit. The risk of cross infection means that patients—who range in age from sixteen to mid-thirties due to limited life expectancy—are unable to socialise with each other, leaving them alone in their rooms for weeks on end. Recurring infections causes the same pool of patients to be in and out of the Unit several times a year. As part of his commission, Gauld, whose humour has a subtle fatalism that appeals to the young adults reliant on the Unit, met with patients to gain insight into the particular circumstances of their condition, the hurtles they encounter, their hopes and fears in order to create a project that is relevant to their reality. The outcome is an urban park featuring humorous vignettes and unexpected elements that unwind across the Unit. This imaginary landscape takes the form of Myriorama-type cards that can be rearranged to create variations in each room, so patients can explore the work more fully–-and discover new vistas–-every time they are re-admitted to hospital.

Working with a cartoonist, who had never before considered making a three dimensional installation, is part of our effort to look beyond obvious sources for visual art. Jewellery designers, Tatty Devine and the children’s book writer, Chris Haughton also created their first architectural scale works with Vital Arts—to great effect.

Vital Arts attends to the entire human life span—from unborn babies to the recently departed—with projects in the Antenatal Unit, as well as the Deceased Persons Holding Unit, otherwise known the Morgue. For the latter, Julia Vogl looked to William Morris, whose childhood home is located near our hospital in Walthamstow. Her commission features an illuminated window box, wall hangings and soft furnishings based on leaf forms to create meditative spaces for grieving families. We extended motifs from her work to the production of tote bags. These, to enable relatives to bring home the personal effects removed from their departed loved one in a thoughtfully designed holdall, rather than the indifferent sacks previously employed.

Other projects where creativity takes on a practical application include life-drawing sessions for mothers of newborns to encourage bonding and help prevent postpartum depression and psychosis. Another is a culturally diverse cookbook of kidney-friendly recipes developed in collaboration with graphic design students and renal patients forced to follow a restricted diet. Elsewhere, we have asked various artists—Tord Boontje, Jacques Nimki, Zarah Hussain—to develop window treatments to provide privacy, or to partially obscure views, rather than resort to curtains. With all these projects, although they appear to instrumentalise creativity, the artist’s practice is never compromised nor diminished.

Still other projects that do not sit squarely within the conventional perimeters of contemporary art include a perfume by Nimki made from plants and wildflowers collected from the immediate surroundings of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.  Another we want to develop entails artist-designed jars for honey from hives we hope to introduce to our hospitals in the farther reaches of east London. Another possible venture that Vital Arts is keen to explore is the commissioning of sound work for broadcast over hospital radio stations. Vital Arts would like to introduce specially produced poetry, literature, music and sound art over the airways, offering patients another platform to engage with art (that is non-visual and readily available from bed) and thus extending this strand of our programming which has featured Lemn Sissay—our Poet-in-Residence in 2012—and Chris Watson who developed two sound works for Vital Arts, also in 2012.

These are just a few examples of the hundreds of site-specific and patient-responsive projects which Vital Arts has devised for the five hospitals across Barts Health NHS Trust.

Unlike most Arts and Health teams in UK hospitals, Vital Arts sits within an NHS Trust, rather than an associated charity. Established in response to the Department of Health (DoH) modernisation agenda, the Trust exhibited foresight in providing an Arts and Wellbeing service as a central component of compassionate care.

The recent expansion of Barts Health NHS Trust to include not only Barts and the Royal London, but three other hospitals further east in London—Whipps Cross, Mile End, Newham University Hospital—makes the Trust one of the largest in the UK. There is now an abundance of buildings, departments and clinical services across east London in need of artistic interventions that will welcome, edify, delight—and even amuse—our increasing number of patients. Vital Arts eagerly looks forward to meeting the challenge of delivering many more innovative projects in the years to follow, and to continuing to open horizons by raising the bar of arts in healthcare.

This text is an extension of an earlier version published in What Does Art Do In Hospitals, KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge, Denmark, 2017

Catsou Roberts is the Director of Vital Arts, which she joined in 2009. She sits on various advisory boards, including the Art Group for Maggie’s Cancer Caring Trust and the AHRC-funded Dementia Connect. Previously, she was Senior Curator at Arnolfini, Bristol where she curated monographic shows by Janice Kerbel, Joachim Koester, Liam Gillick, Vito Acconci, Michael Snow, Victor Burgin. Before joining Arnolfini in 1999, Roberts curated several free-lance exhibitions with Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Morris, Douglas Gordon, Fiona Banner, Sam Taylor-Wood among others.  In 2015 she was Guest Curator of a city-wide art festival in Lectoure, France entitled The Vanishing Point of History with Matthew Buckingham, Melik Ohanian, Larry Achiampong and others. Roberts was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Museum Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and later attended the Ecole du Magasin Curating Programme in Grenoble, France. She earned a degree in Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University, before undertaking graduate work in the History and Theory in Modern and Contemporary Art at State University of New York, Stony Brook. She has written extensively about art and frequently serves as a visiting lecturer. She is a member of AICA and IKT. Roberts has lived and worked in the USA, France, Germany, Japan, as well as the UK.