73 Oh my GOSH, you’re wellcome kitten! working with MCU to re-invisage spaces for mental health

Madlove/GOSH Arts/Wellcome Trust. Artist and mental health activist the vacuum cleaner was commissioned by The Welcome Collection to create an exhibition piece for their new permanent gallery ‘Being Human’. Working within Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health unit, the vacuum cleaner (James Leadbitter) has collaborated with GOSH Arts and young people who have complex combinations of mental health disabilities. By making a unique studio space in a temporarily disused part of the hospital, and through an in-depth process of exercises, tasks and making, he addressed themes of space, materiality, wellbeing and self-identification. These weekly interventions provided a platform for the young people with lived experience to take agency over future health care delivery and challenging us to re-think, re-inspire and redesign healthy environments for mental distress. Through creating a vision of what mental health care could be like, and how we define our own experiences the process, which is naturally cathartic, he has also created a safe space to explore complex and challenging emotions and distress outside the confines of formal therapy. Equally it has offered adults and young people, care givers and care receivers relatable experiences. The outcomes of this unique and delicate process have informed a new artwork which takes the form of a play and touch model - containing a range of play objects, smells and textures that allow gallery visitors to create a healthy environment that would support our mental health. The outcomes were also shared in the brief to architects working on the new CAHMS unit at GOSH.