It was nearly 10 years ago that Tim A Shaw and his partner, Niamh White, found themselves visiting a close friend who had been admitted as an inpatient to a mental health unit.
“It was a really inhumane, cold, clinical space,” he recalls. “Very bare. Quite claustrophobic. Entirely the opposite of where someone who’s really struggling should be. It felt like our friend had been let down.”
What would happen, the pair wondered, if they could draw on their backgrounds in the art world – Shaw is an artist, White a curator – to “bring artists in and transform the space? We’re used to making spaces beautiful for other people. It felt like we could translate that into mental health units.”
