Melanie Grant & Solomon Szekir-Papasavva (Wellcome Collection)

Wellcome’s ‘Art and Health’ collections began as a grouping of six discrete collections of artistic and archival material created in healthcare contexts. They include: 

• the Adamson Collection, a rare and important collection of 6000+ artworks produced in the studio of art therapy pioneer Edward Adamson at Netherne psychiatric hospital

• work by individuals living with mental or physical health issues, giving rare and unique insights into how lived experience of health issues can be expressed creatively e.g. the Audrey Amiss archive

• the archives of organisations which promoted and researched artistic creativity to encourage self-expression, recovery and wellbeing, e.g. Arts for Health

These collections are diverse, insightful, personal and powerful. They raise complex and challenging questions around art and identity, value and power. Together this grouping gave us a starting point for innovating how we work across Wellcome Collection and with external partners to enhance the value of the collections and to enable meaningful interactions with them.  

Through our engagement programme, conversations and collaborations have taken place involving under-represented audiences. We have particularly focused on groups with the closest possible links to the original creators of our Art and Health collections, primarily artists with lived experience of health issues, and practising art therapists. By building research development work around non-traditional, non-academic audiences, we are nurturing and facilitating non-traditional uses of our collections, in turn challenging the definition of what research means for Wellcome Collection. This has led to important discussions around developing and cataloguing our collections, e.g. Art, Power and the Asylum, a series of public discussions which explored the complex, sensitive and divisive ethical issues surrounding the management of art from the asylum within a library context. We are also developing a strategy for collecting contemporary art, and these kinds of engagements have been vital in helping us formulate our ideas around what we acquire as art, or call the artist. We have begun to respond by deepening our Graphic Medicine collection and moving into collecting artists’ books and zines.

Art and Health has allowed us to challenge our established practices. As our Art and Health collections grow it’s vital for us to cultivate a conversation between development, engagement and external partners, so that no one element is the beginning or end. The more closely and responsively we work, the more firmly we are embedding our relationships, and the more genuinely meaningful and sustainable they will be. Ultimately, we hope to normalise these new audience groups, new definitions of research and new relationships, and for this to influence how the library as a whole approaches our collections and audiences. 

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Mel Grant is a Collections Development Librarian for Wellcome Collection. With a particular focus on medical humanities and the arts, Mel looks holistically across all collections in order to drive their development in interesting and innovative directions. Mel comes from an art history and art libraries background.

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Solomon Szekir-Papasavva is the Engagement Officer for Wellcome’s ‘Art and Health’ collections. He is currently developing new and diverse research audiences through an accessible and responsive engagement programme. Solomon comes from an education and museum engagement background, and has worked with a rich mix of audiences in Japan, Brazil and across the UK.