Hospital Rooms – ‘Not a Patient but a Person’

Hospital Rooms is an award-winning charity that commissions artists to work in partnership with patients and staff to create artworks and radical new versions of clinical spaces for locked and self-cure mental health units.

The organisation has undertaken a number of acclaimed projects, completed in some of the most challenging mental health settings.

For every Hospital Rooms’ project a carefully selected roster of artists are assigned to a project according to the needs of each community. Their artists work closely with patients, staff and the NHS Trust to create unique, world class and site specific artwork. The Space worked with the organisation to allow larger audiences to experience and engage with a number of artworks in a meaningful way by creating a number of short films that show the process and impact of Hospital Rooms projects.

‘Not a Patient but a Person’ follows Turner Prize nominated artist Mark Titchner in the creation of an artwork for the Jasmine Lodge, a mother and baby mental health unit that provides care for new mothers who experience serious mental health episodes and keeps them together with their babies whilst they recover.

“The process that the charity goes through, with the workshops and the care of the installations and the effort the artists put in, very much validated me as a human being or individual, with permission to need and want a nice environment and made me feel like I was not just a patient-but a person. It felt very inclusive, when sometimes suffering with mental illness can be very isolating.”

Cat Lee, Service User Representative

You can view the full series here.

Follow @_hospitalrooms
Films directed by @marieschuller
Digital renders by @jonemmony
Additional footage by @tempomedia
With thanks to @marktitchner @DPT_NHS
Film series commissioned by @thespacearts

#CultureMatters #HospitalRooms #TheArtofHappiness #MentalHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #ACEsupported

About this artist

Artist Tim A Shaw and curator Niamh White founded Hospital Rooms after a close friend was sectioned and admitted to a mental health hospital. On visiting her, they were shocked to find that the hospital environment was cold and clinical at a time when she was so vulnerable. Having worked in the arts for 10 years each, they felt they had the skills and community to be able to transform these spaces with high quality artworks.