We are delighted to welcome the You Scrub Up Well exhibition to the Hearth Gallery, displaying artwork created by participants of the CF Voices Project. The project was a collaboration between the Arts for Health and Wellbeing Team, Cardiff & Vale Health Charity, CAVUHB, Four in Four and the staff at the All Wales Adult Cystic Fibrosis Centre, University Hospital Llandough and Multi-Disciplinary Team.
Over the last 3 years the world has changed for people living with Cystic Fibrosis (CF), for some more dramatically than others. Some of the big changes have been due to Covid-19, the introduction of Kaftrio (a new Cystic Fibrosis treatment), and the opening of a new CF unit at University Hospital Llandough.
The ultimate goal of CF Voices was to help create a future CF `Service’, which meets the needs of both staff and People Living with Cystic Fibrosis, created through opening conversations between people with CF and the CF team.
The artwork on display was created by People Living with Cystic Fibrosis as a direct response to workshops and creative arts sessions delivered by Four in Four throughout the duration of the project. The sessions explored why we react in certain ways to stimulus & environmental stresses, and encouraged people to engage emotionally. This allowed the participants to use creative arts as a way of expression, giving the viewer an insight into their lived experience of being diagnosed with CF.
The artists worked with a variety of mediums to create the pieces, exploring video, photography and installation, as well as the traditional art forms of painting and drawing. The breadth of skill on display reflects the various avenues of the creative arts that can be taken to positively affect one’s health and wellbeing.
Artists: Shannon James, Adam McCusker, Stephanie Rutt, Caroline Marie & Kimberly Toogood
Curated by: Tamsin Griffiths & Paul Whittaker (Four in Four) and the Arts for Health and Wellbeing Team
What made this project unique was the opportunity to work with the CF staff as well as the patients, connecting them together as people. As artists with Mental Health diagnoses, we know how easy it is to view a service through the lens of either a Patient or a Health Professional, falling into playing out a specific “role”. The CF team’s goal is to develop a shared decision-making service between patients and staff that recognises each other’s expertise as having equal value. We were engaged in the project to amalgamate our creative practice and lived experience to help bridge the gap between the patients and staff by changing the conversation and allowing them to start looking at each other as people. Instead of the question being “What does Cystic Fibrosis mean to you?” the question we asked both staff and patients, “Who are you?”
Tamsin & Paul (Four in Four)
Given an opportunity for healthcare professionals to learn from the lived experience of those people living with CF who receive care from our service and has also given a platform for people to share their experience working in the field of Cystic Fibrosis. The landscape of CF has changed dramatically with recent advances in medications and with the onset of COVID-19. The process has allowed exploration of service co-design and helped to explore what is important to people living with CF and how their relationship with the CF service is evolving as the landscape of CF care is changing
Dr Jamie Duckers, Research Lead & Consultant in CF and General Medicine
As People Living with Cystic Fibrosis we live two lives, moving between hospital and home so seamlessly, interchanging and fulfilling the roles of patient and person. When we are in hospital we can feel like a subject matter to be studied on paper and in those moments our interactions fail to represent us as the people we are. We feel like lower… paler… duller versions of ourselves. Our personal lives put on pause; our lives governed by timelines not of our making. But outside, in our lives beyond the hospital, where our timelines are our own, we are not low or pale or dull. We are humans with deep complex feelings and full lives, with hopes, dreams and many, many commitments.
CF Voices Artists: Shannon James, Adam McCusker, Stephanie Rutt, Caroline Marie & Kimberly Toogood
