Hospital Rooms x Hauser & Wirth
Opening 19 August – 14 September 2022, Hauser & Wirth gallery will host a major exhibition and events programme showcasing the work of arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms.
Hospital Rooms envisions a new world where abundant and meaningful creative opportunities are readily accessible to people with severe and enduring mental health diagnoses and where mental health hospital environments are inventive cultural spaces offering solace, comfort and dignity.
Hauser & Wirth have been a key supporter of Hospital Rooms over the past three years through annual auctions that have collectively raised over £200,000 for the charity. In 2021, the auction supported Hospital Rooms’ most pioneering project to date with South West London and St George’s Mental Health Trust as part of their newly built Trinity and Shaftesbury buildings at Springfield University Hospital. This has resulted in 20 major artworks and a programme of 120 art workshops for people using mental health services.
The exhibition will share ambitious new artworks by Harold Offeh, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Mark Titchner that have been created in collaboration with people with lived experience of mental health services and installed inside mental health hospitals across the UK.
Connections
Harold Offeh, 2022
Connections by Harold Offeh has emerged from a series of six workshops with students from Springfield Recovery College in Tooting facilitated by Hospital Rooms. Participants were invited to develop a design for their own individual clay tiles inspired by diverse cultural and historical references ranging from Ghanaian adinkra symbols to William Morris patterns. The group was asked to think about values, feelings or emotional states they would want to communicate to staff, service users and visitors in the new Springfield Hospital. Offeh created a collective design that incorporates the individual tiles and links them with a series of connecting lines. The lines are a graphic metaphor, reflecting the links and conversation formed within the group. The overall design can be read like a network, a web or a mind map that showcases the diverse and creative responses, but also conveys the interconnectedness of the six-week process of making and thinking together.
This programme and artwork was funded by the Wandsworth Grant Fund and Arts Council England.
A Densely Layered World (Tower)
Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2022
Michelle Williams Gamaker will install a reflective chamber within the gallery, which is a new iteration of a monumental artwork, Springfield Eternal, 2022, created for the new Trinity building being built at Springfield University Hospital in Tooting. Michelle worked with people who have experience of mental health services across inpatient units, the Springfield Recovery College and in The Courtauld Gallery. During sessions titled ‘A Densely Layered World’, participants viewed the captivating realms depicted inside multi-panelled Medieval paintings in The Courtauld collection. They looked in detail at how the various props and symbols in the compositions told rich stories. Participants then used beautiful acetate imagery of animals, objects, sculptural deities and tropical flora to create their own visual stories through collage. Michelle has drawn on their creations in making this artwork that offers up a radical new vision for mental health spaces. This immersive object will double as a film prop in her upcoming film, Thieves, 2023.
This programme and artwork was funded by Arts Council England and The Courtauld Gallery.
Like There Is Hope And I Can Dream Of Another World
Mark Titchner, 2022
Mark Titchner is creating a major new text based 15-metre-long painting on dibond in the gallery space that reads ‘Like There Is Hope And I Can Dream Of Another World’. The phrase was inspired by an interview with Julia Foxon, who has lived experience of mental health services, in response to the question “How should an artwork in a mental health hospital make you feel?” After the exhibition, this work will be installed by Queen’s at the newly built Rivers Centre in Norwich, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust that will provide care to people with severe and enduring mental health diagnoses.
Art Programme
This exhibition will play host to an investigative and collaborative arts programme that invites wider artists and arts organisations to join Hospital Rooms and Hauser & Wirth in imagining a new future for mental health services. This will include a series of workshops and a research symposium that will host a number of vibrant conversations with leading thinkers in a variety of relevant fields.
Family Festival featuring Molly Bonnell and Tom Shepherd-Barron
Hauser & Wirth London
20 August 2022 10:00 – 16:00
Hospital Rooms curators and artists Molly Bonnell and Tom Shepherd-Barron will host a day of art workshops for young families where they will be experimenting with colour and tactile printmaking methods to encourage play and creativity.
Multiple drop-in sessions will take place throughout the day. Participants will be invited to explore a mix of mechanical, automated and alternative methods of printing that will result in the creation of individual and large-scale co-created artworks to be displayed in the CAMHS services at Springfield Hospital.
Molly Bonnell and Tom Shepherd-Barron are artists, designers and researchers. They are residents in Kocido Studio and frequently collaborate on socially, culturally and environmentally motivated projects together. Most recently they worked with the Natural History Museum and the Museum for the United Nations on a health and sustainability initiative.
Art Workshops featuring Molly Bonnell and Tom Shepherd-Barron
Hauser & Wirth London
24 August 2022 10:00 – 12:00
Hospital Rooms curators and artists Molly Bonnell and Tom Shepherd-Barron will host two dedicated sessions for participants from Springfield University Hospital Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services. Together they will explore a mix of mechanical, automated and alternative methods of printing that will result in the creation of individual and large-scale co-created artworks to be displayed in the CAMHS services at Springfield Hospital.
Art Workshop featuring Siphiwe Mnguni and Valerie Asiimwe Amani
Hauser & Wirth London
Saturday 27 August 10:30 – 15:30
Hospital Rooms curators and artists Siphiwe Mnguni and Valerie Asiimwe Amani will be running a workshop on defining your personal visual narrative using BIPOC characters in film and literature, along with historical figures as a way to reimagine representation of minority communities. The workshop will consist of two sessions where participants will create live self-portraits, led by Mnguni; and a second session where words are incorporated in collage building and poetry making led by Amani.
Siphiwe Mnguni is a British-Zimbabwean multi-disciplinary artist and photographer based in southeast London. She has been shortlisted for the 2022 Dentons Art Prize and recently exhibited with Oliver Projects.
Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian multidisciplinary artist and writer based in southwest London. She was the recipient of the 2021 Vivien Leigh Prize and recently had a solo performance at South London Gallery.
Art Workshop featuring Linda Bell
Hauser & Wirth London
3 September 2022 10:00 – 12:00 and 13:00 – 15:00
Linda Bell will host a day-long interactive event sharing her performative sculptural work, further developing the video artwork she has produced with the Share Community and Hospital Rooms for the new Trinity building being built at Springfield University Hospital in Tooting.
Linda creates large-scale, interactive sculptural artworks. The sensory process of making is crucial to Linda’s practice. She explores the sensory nature of materials, carefully assembling foil, fabric, paper and card. Linda often performs with her artworks, giving the works new meanings as they are transformed through movement and interaction. Collaboration with audience members and participants is an important aspect of Linda’s practice. These collaborations allow her to explore the relationship between herself, her work and her collaborators.
Linda led two workshops at the Share Nurseries in the grounds of Springfield University Hospital in June with members of the Share Community. Linda and the group created tactile sculptures which were billowed, swung and draped around the space as well as taken on processions through the garden.
Video footage of the artworks being interacted with and activated in the sessions will form a video piece to be permanently installed at Springfield Hospital. The video will capture the meditative and collaborative nature of Linda’s practice and the sculptures and performances she created with the group.
ActionSpace is London’s leading development agency for learning disabled artists. Based in Wandsworth, they are an exceptional visual arts organisation with big ambitions for all the artists that they work with. They support, advocate and promote diversity within the contemporary visual arts sector. All of their work is focused towards enabling learning disabled artists to have a professional career in the arts.
Wandsworth-based Share Community are a training centre providing learning and wellbeing resources to help adults with learning disabilities, autism, and other support needs live life to the full.
Research Symposium
Hauser & Wirth London
10 September 2022 10:00 – 16:00
Speakers to be announced.
A multidisciplinary symposium that takes the work of Hospital Rooms as a departure point to consider and critically reflect upon the spaces we work in and the communities we work with. This symposium will facilitate conversations that engage with how artistic processes, and participating in the creation of an artwork, can empower and elicit moments of reflection and exchange alongside an exploration and discussion as to how permanent installations and artworks interact with and affect the environment and encounters with a locked mental health ward.