The Royal Academy of Arts creative arts project Personal Landscapes - views from the end of life

The finished artwork created by groups of St Christopher’s and Harris HospisCare patients and their families/friends

Between January and March 2012, the Royal Academy of Arts and St Christopher’s Hospice worked on a new dynamic creative arts project. The project captured the views of dying people and those who care for them through the creation of a range of artistic stories and landscapes. The project ran alongside a new David Hockney exhibition, shown at the Academy during the same time period. Hockney’s landscapes capture one persons unique view of the same vista at different moments in time. 

James Williams, contributor to St Christopher’s artwork at the Royal Academy of Art

This project offered the opportunity for those people affected by death, dying and bereavement to explore their own changing ‘landscape’ from a range of different perspectives. We will all die; we will all be bereaved. Significant events in life offer possibilities for us to re-form and sometimes to re-create our own ‘vista’, ‘ story’ or ‘landscape’ in order to make sense of, and capture, what is happening to us and what really matters. The creative arts offer a powerful and meaningful context in order to contain and capture these events from specific moments in time; leaving behind a legacy, which can be both deeply personal, and a real work of art, which can be witnessed, shared and remain long after we have died.

The project culminated at an evening event held at the Royal Academy, during which the artwork created by patients, families and users of St Christopher’s was exhibited. A discussion panel comprising Nigel Hartley, Director of Supportive Care at St Christopher’s;actress Sheila Hancock, Vice-President of St Christopher’s;Sir Richard MacCormac RA;and Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive of the Guys and St Thomas’ Charity, was chaired by Dr Alison Bracker, Education and Lectures Manager at the Royal Academy. Discussion focussed around the place of the arts when  coming to the end of life, the panel members personal and professional experiences and range of topics raised by the audience were debated.

The partnership between the Royal Academy of Art and St Christopher’s Hospice will continue as an annual event.

David Hockney, Winter Timber, 2009, Oil on 15 canvases, 274.32 x 609.6 cm, Private Collection
© David Hockney   Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson