­
ARE YOU FEELING BETTER? - Critical Arts in Health Network







No-place (Utopia)
Are You Feeling Better?


CAHN core group of members first met through working together on a project titled Are you Feeling Better? This 2016 education and exhibition programme was curated by Frances Williams and commissioned by The Cultural Institute (Kings College London). Aspects of this work were exhibited in the UTOPIA 2016 London festival at Somerset House. The theme of utopia was a peg on which to hang a series of relationships and conversations which sat somewhere between informal, experimental learning, healthcare and the arts.





Together with student nurse Tim Owen Jones, artist Anthony Schrag established The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, an informal, confidential, social space by which to explore our imperfections with one another. It was the acknowledgment of imperfection which served to make these students ‘feel better’ about themselves in an academic context - one of enormous pressure as they strived to succeed in exams, fuelled by their own (and others) high expectation.

Artist Becky Shaw was supported by research midwife Mavis Machirori and a wider group of PhD students. Together they explored the – sometimes difficult– gap between the role of dispassionate researcher and active interventionist. What kinds of revealing and concealing are necessary in the distance the researcher travels from ‘workbench to bedside’? A film playfully explored searching and finding through an unusual game of ‘Hide and seek’ held in a medical simulation ward.



A film playfully explored searching and finding through a game of ‘hide and seek’ held in a medical simulation ward (Hiding in Plain Sight [FW1] ). Through exploring the material environments of care and the ways staff disappear or become visible in them, the work proposed a form of escape from, or a way to re-form, institutional forces; and a way to work with others to develop shared cross-disciplines forms of criticality.


These works - and others - were brought together in a publication and exhibition titled, Are You Feeling Better? which includes writings and images from this programme. In 2022, we co-wrote an academic paper titled ‘Enstranglements: entering and existing the Arts in Health Setting’ which also drew on this experience, published in Frontiers, 2022.






















Image 1, 2, 4 & 5. Playing hide and seek on the simulation learning ward, (for the making of the film, Hiding in Plain Sight, by Becky Shaw and Rose Butler.)

Image 3. Setting for The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, part of The Cultural Institute’s Utopia Season at Kings College London in 2016.