A study day bringing together clinicians, artists, curators and researchers to explore the potential of creative health.
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As part of the Practices for Change: Artistic Research in Action series, the Arts, Communication and Culture Research Community will host a study day bringing together clinicians, artists, curators and researchers to explore the potential of creative health. The day will consider how artistic research and creative practice might contribute to spaces of care, grief and encounter within hospital settings.
The event will begin with a walking tour of Northwick Park Hospital’s wards and gardens led by artist Youngsook Choi. Drawing on sensory approaches, alongside intuitive and reflective modes of deep listening and mapping, the session will invite participants to attend closely to the hospital environment and consider the relationships, experiences and questions that emerge within these spaces. This will be followed by a collaborative workshop, generating different forms of expression, reflection and enquiry through collective creative practice.
Lunch will be provided, followed by an extended conversation facilitated by artist-curator Annie Kwan, exploring how creative health approaches can inform future projects and partnerships. Part of the discussion includes the collaboration being initiated between London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust and Westminster School of Arts (WSA) at the University of Westminster, building creative relationships and research projects between WSA and Northwick Park Hospital, successfully initiated at the Brent Biennale 2025. The discussion will consider how artistic methodologies can contribute to the design and development of healthcare spaces and how collaborations between artists, researchers and healthcare professionals can help shape future approaches to care.
Bios:
Dr Youngsook Choi is an artist and ecogrief advocate whose socially engaged, site-specific practice explores intimate aesthetics of solidarity, postulating feeling and compassion as fundamental ways of knowing. Ecological grief is central to her work, mobilising collective witnessing as a socio-political autopsy and building eco-literacy as an emergent pedagogy. Embedding collective imagination into her art language, Youngsook founded the transnational eco-grief council ‘Foreshadowing’ and co-founded the practice-based research collective ‘Decolonising Botany’.
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, solidarity, sisterhood and spirituality.
This event is organised by the Arts, Communication and Culture (ACC) Research Community at the University of Westminster. Our community takes an interdisciplinary, creative and speculative approach to the arts in response to pressing contemporary and future challenges. We explore how individuals, communities and institutions can interact, adapt and imagine new possibilities for social and cultural change. The study day also connects with Westminster’s Creative Health Working Group, jointly convened through the Arts, Communication and Culture Research Community and the Health Innovation and Wellbeing Research Community.
