Photography by Damian Griffiths. Images courtesy of Hospital Rooms.
Hospital Rooms is an arts and mental health charity that commissions extraordinary artworks for NHS mental health inpatient units across the UK. Founded by artist Tim A Shaw and curator Niamh White. This exhibition is an opportunity to share and discuss the work of Hospital Rooms, the creation of this new work and some of the issues surrounding art and mental health.
Their latest project has taken place locally at Bluebird House, a secure child and adolescent mental health hospital for 12–18 year olds. Working in partnership with Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, new works have been created by artists Simon Bayliss, Ryan Mosley, Charley Peters, Yukako Shibata, Tim A Shaw and Richard Woods. Staff and service users interacted with the artists through workshops and during the installation of works.
This project has been generously supported by Arts Council England, Garfield Weston Foundation and the Isabella Blow Foundation.
The Artists
Yukako Shibata has lived and worked in London since 1993. Her work explores subliminal colours found in natural environments alongside those in the ‘man-made’ world. Her work is imbued with a sense of clarity and purity through the exploration of colour.
Charley Peters is a painter based in London. Starting from an interest in the legacy of hard-edged abstraction, her work considers the manifestation of abstract language in the context of contemporary visual media. Exploring the spatial potential of the painted surface through oppositions of colour, structure and technique, her meticulously made paintings interrogate our experiences of reading space, materiality and abstract form in the post-digital image world.
Work featured – <RBAY/\VBS> (2019)
Richard Woods was born in Chester, England, in 1966 and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 1990, where he trained as a sculptor. Woods is well known for his architectural installations and resurfacing of structures that propose an absurd twist on the cult of home improvement and DIY aesthetics.
Ryan Mosley is a painter based in Sheffield. He trained at the University of Huddersfield and Royal College of Art. Motivated by a sense of the carnivalesque, Mosley’s work offers up a surreal world of invented characters and rituals that are simultaneously archaic and futuristic.
Simon Bayliss is an artist and music producer based in St Ives, Cornwall, UK. He works mainly in slipware ceramics, video, poetry, watercolour painting and performance. Simon also makes and performs dance music as a solo artist and in collaboration with Susie Green, as Splash Addict.
Tim A Shaw is an artist and co-founder of Hospital Rooms. He makes installations, light-sculptures, paintings and mixed media assemblages that often form immersive spaces that have an atmosphere separate from the gallery space. He studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.
For each Hospital Rooms project, the charity produce a booklet to share the stories of the artworks that were created, the ideas of our artists and testimonies of the patients and staff they work with.
Download the Bluebird House booklet and see the inspiration behind the exhibition.
Printed copies can be purchased from their website and proceeds go towards supporting the charity.
Download PDF