Over the course of 2019/20, artists Jasleen Kaur and Katie Schwab will work closely with staff and patients at Imperial Health Charity, thinking through questions around frailty and ageing, care and healthcare and the NHS today.
The residencies will explore intersections between arts and health, working alongside a Trust-wide research programme called The Frailty Project. The Frailty Project is a programme seeking to improve older patients’ pathways through the hospital system whilst working with staff to increase their confidence and skills in caring for patients.
Imperial Health Charity helps our hospitals do more through grants, arts, volunteering and fundraising. Working in partnership with the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, we fund major redevelopments, research and medical equipment at five London hospitals – Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea, St Mary’s and the Western Eye – as well as helping patients and their families at times of extreme financial difficulty. Supporting the arts in healthcare, we manage an Arts Council accredited hospital art collection and run an arts engagement programme for patients and NHS staff. We also manage volunteering across all five hospitals, adding value to the work of staff and helping to improve the hospital experience for patients. Fundraising through major appeals and community events enables us to continue our essential work.
Jasleen Kaur
Jasleen Kaur (b.1986, Glasgow) is an artist currently living and working in London. Her work is an ongoing exploration into the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within the material and immaterial things that surround us. Her practice examines the hierarchy of histories and labour using a range of mediums and methods including sculpture, video, conversation and cooking.
Kaur employs the cobbled together as an artistic approach, another way to understand the already made. Her refashioned objects are based on instinct and resourcefulness, reflecting a hybridity of national custom and reconsidering the realities of materiality, usage and everyday routine. Creating associations between past and present, high and low culture, mass produced and singular, she flattens hierarchies and acknowledges the less visible. A practice centring on tending her relationships with people and her understanding of materials, makes the processes employed as important as the outcomes.
Recent commissions include the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow Women’s Library, Eastside Projects and Hollybush Gardens. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Royal College of Art and Crafts Council.
Katie Schwab
Katie Schwab’s practice interweaves personal, social, and craft-based histories, often drawing from traditions of living, making and working collectively. Spanning exhibition-making, design commissions, printed resources and workshops, she works across arts, learning and community contexts to explore the ways in which manual and social forms of production can develop within shared spaces.
Schwab graduated from the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 2015. Recent exhibitions and projects include: Making the Bed, Laying the Table, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Jerwood Solo Presentations, Jerwood Space, London, Together in a Room, Collective, Edinburgh; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Backlit, Nottingham and ICA, London; My love is like a red red rose. Art in Scotland from 18th to 21st Century, Musée du Château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard; Fresh, British Ceramics Biennial, The Original Spode Factory Site, Stoke-on-Trent and Project Visible, Tate Modern. Katie undertook the 2015 graduate residency at Hospitalfield, Arbroath and is the recipient of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios MFA Graduate Fellowship, 2015-16. Katie Schwab is the recipient of the Nigel Greenwood Art Prize 2016.
