Hospital Rooms: What Art Can Change

The Art House is delighted to welcome Hospital Rooms to Yorkshire, with a celebratory exhibition that invites us to consider how contemporary art can reshape experiences of care within some of the most complex mental health settings in the UK.

Hospital Rooms is an arts and mental health charity that commissions permanent artworks for NHS mental health wards, working with leading contemporary artists to change the spaces where people receive care.

This exhibition marks the end of a two-year project with South West Yorkshire Partnership Teaching NHS Foundation Trust. Fifteen artists made permanent works for forensic wards and Psychiatric Intensive Care Units at Fieldhead Hospital in Wakefield and Kendray Hospital in Barnsley. These are among the most restricted environments in the NHS, and among the least likely places to have ambitious contemporary art.

The artists ran 50 in-person workshops on the wards and with partners at The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Every proposal was developed for a specific ward space and the conversations and imagery from those sessions shaped what artworks were made.

The exhibition brings together documentation, reproductions, and new works from the project. The artists include: Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq, Simeon Barclay, Thahmina Begum, Kedisha Coakley, Phoebe Collings-James, John Costi, Emma Cousin, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Emma Hardaker, Benaiah Matheson, Haroon Mirza, Meera Shakti Osborne, Karanjit Panesar, Deborah Segun, and Mary Stephenson.

What Art Can Change is delivered in partnership with South West Yorkshire Partnership Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, supported using public funding by Arts Council England and with generous support from Jesseman Prior III.