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Shape Shift Converse Rework: Authentic co-creation of art in mental health settings

Exploring the story, impact and legacy of the Rivers Centre Project at Hellesdon Hospital.

An art installation inside a church features colorful panels, including one with “COURAGE” in bold letters, drawings on a central table, and hanging blue fabric with stained glass windows in the background.

Damian Griffiths, courtesy of Hospital Rooms

The concept of ‘creative health’ encompasses a variety of creative activities and approaches that benefit our health and wellbeing. Over the past five years, staff and researchers from Norwich University of the Arts have partnered with the charity Hospital Rooms and the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) on three large-scale creative health projects within mental health hospitals. The largest and most ambitious of these took place at Hellesdon Hospital, as the site prepared to transition to the newly built Rivers Centre which opened in January 2025.

Hospital Rooms is renowned for bringing museum-quality artwork into mental health settings. For this project, they collaborated with 15 internationally acclaimed artists who lead a programme of workshops at the hospital and partner venues. Working co-creatively with staff and patients, they created brand new artworks that would be permanently installed in the new facility.

Alongside this work, Research Fellow at Norwich Dr Nicola Simpson, worked closely with NSFT’s People Participation Team to recruit a Lived Experience Team (LET) who all had experience as mental health inpatients and an interest in being creative. Acting as co-researchers, the LET played a vital role in developing creative, arts-based, and material research methods to evaluate the impact of these artistic interventions. Together, they explored the transformational effect that the Hospital Rooms project has had on both patients and staff.

The process for this exploration began with several site visits to the old, now unused Victorian asylum buildings, observing the construction site through a cold wet winter, and finally witnessing the emergence of the Rivers Centre complete with its new artworks. These visits were documented through thousands of photographs, field sound recordings, collages, assemblages, and visual mark mapping to explore, understand and communicate the embodied and unspeakable knowledges of inpatient detainment and recovery.

As the project progressed, the team began to reflect on how their creative research could reach a wider audience and tell the story of the Hellesdon Hospital Rooms project. In September 2024, Dr Simpson and the LET began a year-long collaboration with artist and creative health practitioner Holly Sandiford.

Three large translucent blue fabric banners with white abstract designs hang in front of a stained glass window in a church with wooden pews and a high, wooden-beamed ceiling. Sunlight shines through the window and banners.

Together, they created large-scale cyanotypes on silk, collaging artefacts from the old hospital, photos, text, and acetate drawings. This process developed a distinct creative method of cyanovoice. One of these works was exhibited at Shape Shift: Reflections on Art in Mental Health Settings at The Fitzrovia Chapel, London, in March 2025, with five more pieces displayed as part of Shape Shift Converse Rework at Hungate Medieval Art, Norwich, in July 2025.

“Joining the LET team felt like a massive risk. Yet, being surrounded by like-minded and equal individuals, engaging in creative practice for a good purpose couldn’t have been a better risk to take. We came as single artists and continue this process as a collective; a creative committee, respecting ideas and decisions and supporting each other.”

– Fenn Harris, artist and Lived Experience Team member

Hospital Rooms’ founders and Senior Research Fellows at Norwich, Tim Shaw and Niamh White, co-curated the exhibition with the LET researchers. The group not only created and installed their own work in these spaces, but oversaw the overall exhibitions’ thesis, design and implementation, publications, performance events and community-based arts workshops.

At its core, the Rivers Centre LET project has championed authentic, compassionate models of co-production, evaluating impact with experts by experience. With its particular focus on neurological and experiential diversity, the project has empowered these experts to develop their own artistic research and creative health practice. It has ensured that lived experience expertise has iteratively informed evaluation frameworks, embedding a legacy of creative health within the region’s mental health services after Hospital Rooms’ formal involvement ends.

“It’s been a privilege to see the LET project develop and to help connect NSFT with the wider creative community. It’s a great example of how collaboration can create new spaces for expression and reflection.”

– Joseph George, People Participation Coordinator, NSFT

This research strengthens the evidence base for arts interventions in inpatient, secure, and forensic mental healthcare environments. It demonstrates how creative and arts-based research methods can challenge marginalisation, disrupt hierarchies, and remove barriers to access whilst producing outputs that are celebrated as works of art on national and international platforms.

In recognition of its impact, the project was runner-up in the National Centre for Research Methods Impact Prize 2023.

Explore the Rivers Centre Project

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