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Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off! And watch video conversations about the book and its themes here.NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 60th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This the podcast’s fifth birthday! This episode will be available starting 16 January 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean and find links to accompany the podcasts.
Griselda Goldsbrough is Art and Design Development Manager of the National Arts in Hospitals Network (NAHN), which describes itself as “a resource for arts managers in hospitals to champion hospital arts across the UK, supporting recovery and wellbeing.” When you visit the website you’ll see a wealth of downloadable materials, guides, toolkits, and resources for projects.
François wanted to clarify the difference between arts in hospitals and art therapy so listeners could understand the scope of Griselda’s work. He recalled someone telling him years ago that “‘an art therapist works with the part of the person that’s ill. We work with the whole person’, and that helped me understand the difference nicely.” Griselda drew a distinction between clinical work, working therapeutically under clinical supervision, and artists being on a ward to engage and even distract, but not interfere with clinical treatment.
I’ll describe one of the projects Griselda talked about, just to give you an example. It was post-COVID, and everyone was excited about coming back into contact after a period when teams were put on hold or disbanded because of the epidemic.
“We showed our first exhibition down a long corridor. One of the nurses asked me, ‘Do you ever think of this almost like a fashion show corridor? When I walk down here, I always walk with a bit of a swing. I’d love to have my photograph taken.’ We were asking staff, and they said, ‘Oh yes, we always come down the corridor and think that it really means a lot to us in COVID. We haven’t had that connection. We haven’t had that meeting of minds and saying hello to people. So yes, we’d be up for doing this corridor catwalk.’
“The photographer brought in her camera and equipment, and because I’m the chatty one, I said we’ll ask people questions. They wanted their images taken, they wanted to be acknowledged for the work because a lot of them felt very isolated. There were some nurses in the community who literally hadn’t seen anybody, who were very used to working in teams. It was amazing. It was only a day project, but so many people came down. A couple came in on their on the work days off, just because they wanted to tell the story. It was really moving. They were very upset as they began to talk, because it was their first time that they’d actually talked out loud to say what they’d done and what sort of help and support they’d given others in COVID.”
So how did all this start for Griselda? She is based in York, a couple of hours north of London. We asked her to say how she came to do this work. She started with growing up in a farmhouse as part of a big family, a recipe for resilience.
“I decided I wanted to be a jockey and then suddenly decided as I got more into my teens that I’d like to be a fashion designer, going to college to do fashion and textiles. After a while I was more drawn towards teaching. I did all sorts of courses, trying to understand people and where we all come from and things like that. For my textile degree, I ended up doing my dissertation around genetics and genetic engineering and social engineering. I was really interested in where science and arts overlap, and what that meant for the world. I thought that was going to bring all the answers and of course what it brought was more questions.”
Eventually she took a job at York Art Gallery. She’d worked in a coffee shop for years, which was good grounding in connecting with people, transferable to a museum or gallery context. “They were talking about community engagement. My director said, ‘When we saw you and heard what you did, you were already doing what we needed to do in a coffee shop around the corner.’ I didn’t realize that was called community engagement. When I started, I thought, Great, what’s this all about? They were talking about how do we get people to come into art galleries that don’t naturally engage with art galleries? And I said, Oh, have you talked to anybody? And they were like, No, why would we do that? If you don’t know why they don’t come in, what do you know? So it was very much that conversation.
“That’s when I found out about François and read lots about community engagement, and was fascinated by this wonderful world. The way to go out there and explore was to go out to the groups and see what what people actually wanted. That was my entry into community art and I absolutely loved it. It was really my foundation. There’s a place called Peaseholme, a homeless group that I worked with who taught me so much about what what it meant to be not able to engage with an art gallery, what it meant to feel excluded, what it meant to not even be able to go into a building because it felt too big and it felt too scary and intimidating. So I worked with a lot of mental health groups at the time, going to visit them in their places, and then bringing them back, and everybody painting their feet and walking about the gallery, and people going, ‘Griselda, what are you doing?’ But we loved it because that’s what we wanted to do, actually explore the objects, because the objects are all ours, really. So it was fun. I learned lots.”
François had recently offered a talk at a NAHN conference. It made him think about the meaning of encouragement, giving each other courage. “It was a real delight. Every time I find myself in that kind of world, I think, yeah, these are my people. This is where I belong. Yet people who work in situations like hospitals, where you’re working in a very big organization that has very clear and demanding requirements of itself, you’re a bit like a cat on an oil tanker. You wander around and you make things happen, and actually, the oil tanker is still going in the direction it’s going to go in, because it’s an oil tanker, not a home for cats.”
“It does feel like that,” Griselda said. “It feels like you’re precariously placed in this amazing world where there’s some fantastic people, compassionate care, and wonder happening, but also the most vulnerable people are there, and the saddest times of people’s lives. So our job is one where we’re expected to create art for the walls, put exhibitions up, put music in the corridors and the wards to support patients and staff, all while realizing that it’s not an art gallery as such. It is difficult, challenging. It’s this huge bureaucratic system that’s probably far too large for itself. And you’re almost seen as the bottom of the heap. Everybody that I’ve come across loves it, enjoys it in the space and values it. On the other side of that coin is real challenges and difficulties in terms of funding it all. Trying to get funding in to continually do it is one of the major challenges. I love the challenge, but it can be relentless. I try and be really positive.”
When she started working with hospitals, Griselda saw there wasn’t a network of people who do this work, so ten or so years ago, she began to gather people by word of mouth.
“We felt the need to have a network where we could share practice, share what was going on with each other. My queries were quite similar when I met other people doing it. How would we do this without repeating ourselves? What was the lowest cost we could do this for? How do other people do this? Just a few of us getting together realized, as we gradually went on, that there were quite a lot of questions. How do we fund programs? How do we ensure that there’s an arts program in each hospital? We still haven’t conquered that, but we hope to. I’m still on the steering group. It’s just got bigger and bigger over the years, which is brilliant. We get together three or four times a year. It might be about guidance, it might be about governance. It might be about what programs we run. And often people are at very different stages.”
Listen to the episode as we get into some deep conversations about what it’s like to be in the hospital and how arts work changes the atmosphere; how the work can bring fun and joy to the institution, how the Network helped people get through the pandemic with creativity intact; and how projects evolve organically from people’s ordinary interactions. The question of how to demonstrate the value of the work gets thoughtful attention too, along with the need to counter old attitudes about what people in an institutional setting deserve in comparison with the deprivation that too often sets the tone.
Gary Clark, Jr., “The Healing.”