Shape Shift

Shape Shift

Shape Shift is a new exhibition from arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms in partnership with the Fitzrovia Chapel, the chapel for the former Middlesex Hospital. Hospital Rooms radically reimagine environments, bringing creativity, colour and kindness to mental health hospitals. This show tells the stories of artworks from a three year project at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, which commissioned 15 international artists – Sarah Dwyer, Errol Francis, Ghislaine Leung, Michael Landy, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Shepherd Manyika, Jade de Montserrat, Nengi Omuku, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, Fabian Peake, Heather Phillipson, Holly Sandiford, Dolly Sen, Mark Titchner, and Ken Nwadiogbu – to work with the hospital’s patients and staff, creating major artworks.

Through this process of collaboration, imagining and working, new and poetic dreams came into being, while personal, domestic, institutional and clinical narratives collided. This exhibition attempts to navigate these collisions and to generate further discussion. It is set within the walls of the Fitzrovia Chapel, a building where patients, families and staff would once come for calm, respite and sanctuary during busy and sometimes fraught hospital days and nights.

Fabian Peake, The Forest, 2024 (detail). Hellesdon Hospital, Norwich. Photo © Hospital Rooms (Damian Griffiths)
The show includes a recreation of Fabian Peake’s The Forest (above) for which he scribed the life stories of workshop participants in his signature mirror writing directly onto a waiting room wall at Hellesdon. Visitors will be invited to tell their own stories in mirror writing on a wall surrounding the artwork.

Sarah Dwyer, Shapeshifters, 2024. Hellesdon Hospital, Norwich. Photo © Hospital Rooms (Damian Griffiths)
Sarah Dwyer’s 20 metre long mural Shapeshifters (above) covered the walls of a mental health ward at Hellesdon. Inspired by workshop exercises where participants were encouraged to vigorously draw 20-second images, engaging their bodies in movement and feeling rather than rational thought, it portrayed a series of abstract figures. Shapeshifters was subsequently removed from the ward following complex and situational responses to the work and will be reincarnated in the chapel.

This unique project is full of contradictions, conflict and conviviality, but above all possibility. Central to the work is the embrace of the unknown, the acceptance of doubt and the potential of the new.

13 to 25 March 2025
11am to 6pm daily (open on Mondays)
12 noon to 5pm Sunday