HOSPITAL ROOMS
Shape Shift. Reflections on Art in Mental Health Settings
Fitzrovia Chapel
2 Pearson Square, London W1T 3BF
HOSPITAL ROOMS: Shape Shift. Reflections on Art in Mental Health Settings
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour
Shape Shift is an exhibition in partnership with The Fitzrovia Chapel, the chapel for the former Middlesex Hospital, and Norwich University of the Arts. The show tells the stories of artworks from Hospital Rooms’ three-year project at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, which commissioned 15 international artists to work with the hospital’s patients and staff, creating major artworks.
Artists: Sarah Dwyer, Errol Francis, Michael Landy, Ghislaine Leung, Shepherd Manyika, Jade de Montserrat, Ken Nwadiogbu, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, Nengi Omuku, Fabian Peake, Heather Phillipson, Holly Sandiford, Dolly Sen, Mark Titchner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh.
Co-Curators: Sophie Bagge, Fenn Harris, Mark Jennings, Su Pashley, Jodie Rowe, Holly Sandiford, Tim A Shaw, Nicola Simpson, Tim Steer, Niamh White.
Through this process of collaboration, imagining and working, new and poetic dreams came into being, while personal, domestic, institutional and clinical narratives collided. This exhibition attempts to navigate these collisions and to generate further discussion. It is set within the walls of the Fitzrovia Chapel, a building where patients, families and staff would once come for calm, respite and sanctuary during busy and sometimes fraught hospital days and nights.
This exhibition has been informed by a research collaboration with Hospital Rooms, Norwich University of the Arts, and a Lived Experience Team of co-researchers who are evaluating this large-scale multi-site Arts Intervention at Hellesdon Hospital. In a series of monthly workshops using creative, arts-based and material research methods, the lived experience co-researchers have engaged with a creative, critical and embodied retelling of the old and new hospital spaces by those who have and will live there. These artistic outcomes are represented here in the Fitzrovia Chapel in cyanotype and sound installations which invite the audience to use all their senses to experience the personal and the public transformation and impact of the arts in mental health hospital spaces.
The Hellesdon Hospital Project was in partnership with Norwich University of Arts, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. Supported by COAT Paints, Hauser & Wirth and Arts Council England. Our cultural partners were Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and the Sainsbury Centre.
Find out more: hospital-rooms.com
From 12th March 2025 To 25th March 2025