Dartington & Hospital Rooms join forces for arts education
Image credit: Mark Jessett, Dining Room, Beech Unit, Torbay Hospital, 2022. Photo by Dom Moore, courtesy of Hospital Rooms
Dartington is delighted to announce a dynamic new partnership with Hospital Rooms to offer residencies for students on its MA Arts & Place to explore their arts practice in professional mental health settings.
Hospital Rooms, whose mission is “to bring world class art and creative programming to mental health hospitals,” will host and mentor selected postgraduate students later this year for artist residencies in Cornwall. The partnership adds a new dimension to what is possible in a residency-based creative degree, giving students the opportunity to explore in practice the role that art can play in the context of mental health, a growing area for the sector. Students will be invited to create new work in response to a project that Hospital Rooms is currently undertaking in collaboration with Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which will see them spending time on inpatient mental health wards in Redruth and Bodmin, and at some of Cornwall’s esteemed cultural organisations. This project adds to an existing network of residency hosts on the MA Arts and Place, which includes Hauser & Wirth Somerset and CAST Cornwall, as well as Ovada in Oxford, Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen and Outlandia in the Scottish Highlands.
In recognition that underrepresented students face greater obstacles to educational achievement, the partnership also includes a new equity, diversity and inclusion scholarship consisting of a £6,000 tuition fee reduction and a guaranteed residency with Hospital Rooms for one eligible student.
Dr Jo Joelson, programme lead for the MA Arts and Place said: “I’m thrilled we are able to announce this new collaboration with an organisation that is making such strides in an important area for the arts. Education at Dartington has always been about developing a practice that faces head on the social and climate issues of our time, and through this partnership we are building in yet another socially-engaged route students can take to develop their practice.”
Anna Testar, Senior Project Curator at Hospital Rooms, said: “The MA Arts and Place at Dartington is a fascinating and progressive course that encourages emerging artists to think outside of the traditional environments of the museum, gallery and studio. We are delighted to be providing an opportunity for students to experience the impact of art in a place that is so far removed from these settings, for people who have little or no access to art, and we are intrigued to see how they respond.”
The partnership builds on the growing interest in the role that the arts can play in healthcare and asks how this general principle works in real-life situations. Students will explore the benefits of a specific project or artwork to the lives of people living with severe mental health diagnoses and their carers, and as such will contribute tangible findings to this debate. Students will also develop their understanding of an artist’s broader connection to place and specific environments, a key element of the transformative learning offered throughout Dartington’s learning programmes today.
Please note, for those interested in applying for the scholarship, we are holding an online live chat session to helop applicants prepare on Wednesday 8 March, 1pm. Register via this link >
Amy McCarthy, Dining Room, Salus Ward, Torbay Hospital, 2022. Photo by Dom Moore, courtesy of Hospital Rooms
MA Arts and Place is a unique, residency-based postgraduate degree run by Dartington, helping students to develop a nuanced understanding of their role as an artist in relation to place, in particular through socially-engaged practice that take their work beyond the four walls of the traditional exhibition space.