Steve Macleod at Griffin Gallery in association with Hospital Rooms

Steve Macleod has been invited to create a new, unique work of art for a group show at Griffin Gallery, curated by Tim A Shaw, Emma Smale and Niamh White. The exhibiton is in assocaition with Hospital Rooms. Hospital Rooms is a mental health charity that believes in the enduring power of the arts to instil value, dignity and wellbeing in people. Its aim is to disrupt the barriers that limit access to art and culture for people using mental health services. 

Exhibiting artists are:

Rachael Champion | Karen David | Jon Emmony | Alexandra Lethbridge | Steve Macleod | Cameron Morgan | Rose Pilkington | Charley Peters | Tim A Shaw | Esna Su

Using the floor plan from his own London apartment (1 Godley VC House), artist Tim A Shaw will construct a skeleton timber framework of his living space to scale within the gallery. Tracing out each room, the structure offers a suggestion of domesticity that provides the setting for a collection of art-works that furnish its interior. Rather than being a stable or fixed piece of architecture, the formation is much more akin to a psychic, virtual or imagined shell through which every ‘room’ is visible.

As a responsive site with the ability to instil feelings of sanctuary, warmth and familiarity, ‘home’ is also the place where our vulnerabilities and anxieties surface at their most palpable. The idea of the home is deeply embedded in human consciousness, where objects can be containers for memories, scents can be comforts or antagonists, architecture can present a means to frame the world. Homeliness can be tangibly felt.

This exhibition also functions as an investigation into the intangible qualities embedded into particular architectural spaces. It will inform the co-curators, who run the mental health and arts charity Hospital Rooms, where they commission world class artists to transform residential secure and locked residential mental health units in NHS hospitals. Each artist works in genuine collaboration with service users and staff, and responds to their thoughts and experiences to make creative and imaginative environments. As a separate location from the mental health units they ordinarily work in, this exhibition offers the freedom to draw out the potential in carefully, radically and candidly thought out living spaces.