About The Artists in residence projects
From the Helmie Stil film The Posh Mums are Boxing in the Square. Based on the poem by Wayne Holloway-Smith.
The Artists in Residence Program
The HS artists in residence program developed out of the recognition that research and writing are insufficient on their own to investigate more fully the past and present of how health is produced and consumed. Thanks to our funders at the Wellcome and through additional funding from the King’s Together scheme at King’s College, London, we were able to fund a wide variety of projects exploring how we make meaning around health and illness, especially in a pandemic. The results have come in a variety of formats: photographs, films, animations, crafted objects, among others, which we are happy now to share with you.
Alasdair Hopwood has created the Wrong Project (preface). Inspired by the ‘wrongs’ of pandemic - the ‘wrong’ guesses, policies, estimates, choices, ideas that publicly and privately accompanied our confrontation with a novel health crisis, a pandemic, the project explores what it means to be wrong, why this matters and how it is determined in the first place. Helmie Stil has made meaning of health and pandemic in a more personal way, with her beautiful, moving, award winning films. Box explores her own family’s lockdown experiences, and The Posh Mums Are Boxing in a Square offers her visual interpretation of a poem (inspired by illness) by Wayne Holloway-Smith. Geoffrey Rees, with the help of Lucas Canino, plays with masks, which quickly became the sign and of our pandemic times. Rita Conry delves into the problems with our healthcare system via what seems at first glimpse a surprising entry point, UTIs. Still to come is another film by Helmie Stil and the artist and animator Dominic Davis, which offers a historical, patient’s eye view on cancer treatment. And don’t miss Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Caitjan Gainty and Eddie Bolger’s visual history of that ‘semi-autonomous expulsion’ so familiar and innocuous yet also so - in a pandemic - threatening and dangerous: the sneeze. Now out with BBC Ideas.