What role can art play in a mental health hospital? For Hospital Rooms, an arts and mental health charity celebrating its tenth anniversary, the answer lies not only in the artworks people encounter, but in the opportunities they have to make art themselves.
Working with artists, people with lived experience and NHS staff, Hospital Rooms transforms mental health environments through ambitious contemporary art and creative programmes. At the heart of this work is a belief that people receiving mental health care should have access to creativity, quality materials and experiences that pinvite imagination and participation.
Feedback from NHS staff involved in Digital Art School, our free programme of artist-led video workshops and art materials, offers a glimpse of what this can mean in practice.
Making creativity accessible
Creative activities in hospitals need to work within the realities of ward life. Staff have different levels of artistic experience, patients have varied interests and abilities, and opportunities to bring people together can be limited. Digital Art School offers a flexible way to make art accessible, with recorded and live workshops that staff can use with groups or individuals.
Oliver Soriano, Chief Nursing Officer at Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, describes how the resources have supported staff across 13 sites and 27 wards.
“We all know that art is not everyone's forte, but the videos that you produce have enabled staff that would not describe themselves as artistic to confidently lead sessions.”
For Oliver, the videos also give patients a chance to see what an activity involves before deciding whether they want to take part. He explains that this approach has helped staff engage people who may not previously have been drawn to art.
Access to materials matters, too. Oliver notes that the quality of supplies available through the project can make a difference to what people are able to create, giving service users the chance to produce work they feel proud of.
The combination of guidance and materials means that staff do not need to be artists themselves to help make creative activity possible.
A shared focus and a sense of achievement
The value of these sessions is also reflected in the everyday experiences staff describe on their wards.
Alison Ingham, Recovery Worker at Rose Ward, Gosport War Memorial Hospital, has seen how workshops can bring patients and staff together around a shared activity. As she puts it:
“The workshops used were really helpful to engage patients to be creative. We have enjoyed all the workshops and all the patients and staff worked together to be creative and forget about current worries and focus on something positive.”
Alison describes how work created during sessions is displayed in the ward corridor. Seeing their pieces on display can give patients a sense of pride in what they have achieved, while offering others an invitation to participate.
For some people, the structure of a workshop provides a helpful starting point: a set of materials, an artist’s guidance and a process to follow. For others, the opportunity to work quietly and at their own pace may be more appealing. Recorded workshops allow staff to revisit activities and fit them around the needs and rhythms of their setting.
Yvonne Ellis, Occupational Therapist at Woodleigh Community in Croydon, has used Digital Art School since its early days. She describes how patients respond to the sessions:
“They all find the group calming and relaxing and always look forward to the next class.”
She is equally clear about the importance of the resources that make participation possible:
“Without your free art materials we would not be able to participate.”
For this year's Digital Art School series, Hospital Rooms is collaborating with the charity ActionSpace to bring workshops from 4 incredible artists over the coming months, including: Mohammed Imran Khan, Declan Leslie, Sharon Adokorach and Immanuel Adelowo.
Bringing contemporary art into hospitals
Alongside opportunities to make art, Hospital Rooms works to bring contemporary artworks into NHS mental health environments. Our tenth-anniversary initiative, 10 Posters for 10 Years, is distributing 10,000 artworks to around 1,000 NHS mental health hospitals and settings across England, including acute, secure and locked wards.
The series features ten leading contemporary artists, including Jeremy Deller, Antony Gormley, Celia Paul, Grayson Perry and Anish Kapoor. By placing artworks in hospital settings, the initiative extends access to contemporary visual culture beyond galleries and into the environments where people receive care.
The posters sit alongside Hospital Rooms’ wider work to transform clinical spaces through art. They also reflect the idea that access to art should not depend on where someone happens to be or the circumstances they are experiencing.
Creating space for imagination
The final poster in the anniversary series is Glow by Anish Kapoor, a longstanding supporter of Hospital Rooms. His relationship with Hospital Rooms includes Breathing Blue, an installation created for the Snowsfields adolescent mental health unit at Maudsley Hospital.
Reflecting on the role of art in these environments, Kapoor says:
“Art in a clinical environment helps to create an opening, a moment where the wall dissolves and the mind can travel somewhere else.”
Whether someone is encountering an artwork on a ward wall or taking part in a creative workshop, art can offer a point of connection and an opportunity for expression.
As Hospital Rooms looks to the next decade, the ambition remains to make these experiences more accessible across mental health settings - not as an addition reserved for a few, but as a meaningful part of the environments in which people live and receive care.
Written by Nancy Dewe Mathews, Communications and PR Consultant, with case studies gathered by Freya O’Brien, Digital Art School Lead and Haley Moyse Fenning, Head of Impact.
