Art in Hospital was established in 1991 as a charitable and autonomous visual arts in healthcare organization, that worked within Greater Glasgow NHS to ‘bring the visual arts into the mainstream of the health service where it can be part of the service that a hospital can offer; that it is seen not as diversional therapy but as an artistic discipline in its own right.’ Graduate artists do not work as art therapists, but as artists. The sessions are not classes but are social and inclusive environments where a ‘person-centred approach’ is adopted allowing patients to develop their own way of working. The workshops have no outlined structure and are open in their approach, ‘the rules of the interaction between the artists and the participants sometimes seeming so fluid that they could only be determined by the dynamics of each individual situation.’

This open style of project management allows more specific long-term workshops to be developed that enchance both the artist-facilitators own research interests and the continuing needs of the patients as creative individuals. One example of this is Object Scores a project developed by sound artist Kirsty Stansfield which involved small group of frail and elderly people that were residents in a continuing care ward of an NHS hospital in Glasgow. Kirsty’s approach allowed an investigation into ‘how sound could enhance an experience of a given situation’ while ‘concurrently providing an opportunity for participants to try "new" art mediums of sound and interactivity.’ By using Speckled Computing, Kirsty designed sound objects that made specific noises depending on how they were moved. With the help of choreographer Colette Sadler, this project enabled Kirsty to observe the embodied knowledge of the elderly people through their interaction with these objects. In this context, embodied knowledge is ‘knowledge expressed and retained by the body, such as life experience, individual 'ticks' or habits, or previous training such as playing an instrument or operating machinery.’

The elderly participants in the project had a chance to extend their creativity into digital media, where sound recording, photography and video making were utilized. The outcome of Kirsty's investigations culminated in the installation Object Scores, shown at Tramway Glasgow earlier this year. This took the form of an interactive table fitted with two wires that produced sound when participants moved their hands over it.

A paper outlining approaches and reflective methods employed throughout the project was presented at Common Work, a conference examining socially-engaged art practice, Tramway 19-20 April 2007.

Quotes are taken from ‘I’ll be doing this sky in my dreams tonight’, art in Hospital, Summerhill Press, 2006

Object Scores, Kirsty Stansfield, rufa.net