Created during cultural awareness week at York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS, this digital ‘culture collage’ piece is celebration of all people and their cultures within the trust. It highlights our shared connections, influences and humanity that are both local and global. Made from photos of people, precious objects, foodstuffs, words and insights shared as part of cultural awareness week in April 2023.
‘Care’ is an emotive and under resourced issue that affects all of us. We can do it well and also very badly. At its best it enables a level playing field, it heals, and empowers people to reach for the stars. At it’s worst it is limiting, isolating and torturous. And at the moment it is in crisis.
Yet Disabled people* and their families have achieved much and shown how caring, inclusive and supportive communities can and do work. But careless budget ‘cuts’ and rationing of resources devalue support, that if invested in would otherwise promote independence and inclusion.
Care has multiple meanings too and people talk about care in different ways. Overworked, undervalued professional’s focus on ‘needs’, ‘functions’ and ‘safety’. Whereas ‘frustrated’ disabled people and their families just want to get on with ‘being independent and included’, ‘having a life’, ‘participating, contributing, achieving’.
So what is the future of care? What could it be? What should it not be? How does it work well? How does it fail? What do we need to do to to make it better, now, soon and later?
These are the questions I am keen to ask. And I’ve built a handcart, with a big space on it for people to say and draw what they think, or let me record their voice, take a photo or to tell me and I’ll capture it from them.
I’m going to wheel the handcart around York and talk to people and communities with, or without, an interest in care and disability.
Then once this is done I am going to use the things people have said to create a doodled summary of the themes and issues about how care is now and how it can be in the future.
Involving everyday people, and what they say and think, valuing their contributions about how the future of care can be better or worse is crucial to positive change. And I hope that this approach of a ‘creative, conversational arty cart‘ will help gather some ideas for this. Care’ what ever its form can be better.
*By ‘Disabled People’ I mean, in the widest sense, those who have diverse bodies and/or minds. That is also, those with impairments that are physical or sensory, or experience mental health issues, chronic illness, long term health conditions, learning difficulties, learning disabilities, autism and associated labels, neurodiversity and other issues.
With some young artists at Door 84 it was a delight to create this local York history collage. We used an old pub sign from the Castle Howard OX and a range of old guide books, maps and postcards. The approach was rip up the books etc and paste photos on the ox and text on the Oxen, adding then an outline in black.
The finished piece is fantastic and now hangs on a wall in Door 84.
Large wall doodle art timeline created for Action on Disability, West London. Includes various key moments in disabled peoples history and politics such as; ‘865 Legend says that the Disabled Viking prince, Ivarr the Boneless, led the invasion of England and was carried into battle on a shield’, through ‘1965 the Disablement Income Group, run by disabled people lobbies for changes in disability policy’, and ‘2023 New Action on Disability (AoD) Centre for Independent Living opens.’
In 1873, in The Groves, York, Charles Hardacre, a greengrocer seeks help. And within records from the York Poor Law Union Workhouse Committee at that time, under the entry for ‘Quantity and Description of Relief in Kind’ its states he is offered ‘examination and assistance’, at the cost of 24 shillings.
The ‘description of disability’ penned in an inky script as ‘lunatic’. This piece is a tribute to all those in Mental Health institutions, past, present and future. Considering the current crisis in support, it asks the question, how it is that we can better frame, respond to, and record our inevitable experiences of mental distress and health?
Made as part of the ‘Heritage Hunters’ community heritage research project with York Castle Museum and The Groves Association.
Thanks to Explore York Libraries and Archives and Borthwick Institute for Archives – University of York. And finally, a very big thanks to Imogen Kate for the excellent voice over. Stephen Lee Hodgkins, May 2023.
With near on a thousand years of events and happenings, it was a pleasure to create this timeline for Hull Minster.
Hand drawn, digitised then printed the piece stretches over 8 metres in the newly refurbished entrance and welcomes visitors with many quirky doodles representing the many goings on of this magnificent space.
Here is a three minute audio visual summary – ‘How educational systems respond to diversity, inclusion and social justice: Disability, power, discipline, territoriality and deterritorialization’. By Navin Kikabhai, and published in The British Journal of Sociology, 73 (4), July 2022.
…Looking within, to look out for folk, from a hidden corner…’
Celebrating all the very hard work of Scarborough Hull York Pathology Service (SHYPS), with this huge doodled wall art recently installed in York and Scarborough Hospitals. Plus also, 200 #letterpress prints for the staff based on this piece were created as part of this work.
We Are Pathology.
Following a visit to SHYPS service I doodled a shared spoken word piece based on what staff said to me about their work, wellbeing and generally how they go proudly about their business to get stuff done together.
I then set this in letterpress type, sent it for review, did some edits, then with digital magic created the wall art piece using both the doodles and letterpress text forms.
Then, visiting SHYPS again I created 200 letterpress versions of the piece on an vintage #adana8x5 machine on handmade lokta paper. One for each of the staff.
Some old neighbours names carved on bricks – Stephen Lee Hodgkins, 2022.
Just behind York’s ‘Bile Bean’ Ghost sign on Lord Mayors walk is Monk Bar car park. These bricks were recovered in late 2021 from a hole being dug there.
The hole was dug to install some electrical car charging points. The bricks were revealed as if once part of the foundations of a house wall. Previously, this area was not a car park, but the many terraced homes of Newbiggin Street and Groves Lane.
‘Cook’s York Directory of 1922’, published by the Yorkshire Gazette Newspaper held at Explore York Library and Archive, list some of the names of people living in those streets at that time.
Brayshaw, Christina ANNE. 20 Groves Lane.
BEAN, William. 17 Newbiggin Street.
TATE, Sarah Elizabeth. 19 Groves Lane.
WARD, Tom. 24 Groves Lane.
I have walked along Groves Lane many times not really thinking about it as a street of homes where families and folk lived, worked and played some 100 years ago. But these bricks possibly were part of the homes, or their neighbours’ homes that these people and their families lived in.
I wonder who these people were, what they were like and what life was like for them. What made them laugh, what made them cry? Did they know each other and what they might have said to one another when going about their everyday lives. Did they ask how each other, how they had been? And what were their replies?
I am now wondering about who might, in 2122, 100 years from now, be walking down Groves Lane, what they will be like, how might they live and where they might be going?