Hellingly Centre wins funding for exciting arts project

The Hellingly Centre, which is run by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, is one of just six mental health units across the country to benefit from the exciting initiative being organised by national charity Hospital Rooms.

The project will see world-class artists work in collaboration with staff and patients to create extraordinary works of art that will help to transform the wards.

The Hellingly Centre is a medium secure hospital which provides care for adults with mental health problems who are involved with the criminal justice system.

Laura Woods, Matron at the Hellingly Centre, said: “We are proud of our hospital environment and our facilities but also have an awareness that our hospital space lacks ‘soul’ due to its newness.

“We are continually striving for patient-led creative projects to enhance the environment and provide therapeutic opportunities for patients to express themselves and to have their narratives of life here, their histories and their futures heard.

“Hospital Rooms excites us and we believe the collaboration offered is a fantastic opportunity for the patients and staff here to create something unique and of high quality to enhance our shared environment.”

Work is due to start in March with artists including Richard Wentworth, Lothar Gotz and Tim A Shaw.

Hospital Rooms commissions world-class artists to radically transform secure mental health units with museum quality and compliant art. They make challenging clinical environments imaginative, thoughtful and rejuvenative.

Their work is supported by grants from Arts Council England, the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Isabella Blow Foundation, Hospital Rooms friends and donors and ‘in kind’ art materials from Liquitex and time from artists.