Celebrating 10 years of GOSH Arts with co-curated exhibition for families and staff
8 Sep 2025, 11:50 a.m.
We’re excited to be celebrating 10 years of GOSH Arts, the arts and cultural programme at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH). Through live arts, exhibitions, and a vibrant art collection, the GOSH Charity-funded programme brings creativity into the hospital, helping to transform clinical spaces, support wellbeing and deliver quality arts engagement.
To mark this milestone, the GOSH Arts team has launched a special exhibition for families and staff entitled Room for Art, curated in collaboration with GOSH patients and artist Jo Brinton.
The exhibition showcases 10 vibrant artworks from the expansive GOSH Arts collection, selected by 22 young people at the hospital. The GOSH Arts collection is displayed throughout the hospital. This is the first time these pieces have been brought together in one exhibition.
Room for Art opened in April and will be available to all patients, families and staff at GOSH for around six months. As a pilot project, it aims to inform how GOSH Arts can co-curate with young people and build better patient engagement with the hospital's art collection.
Please note that this exhibition is not open to the general public.
Curating through conversation
The project began with creative discussions between Jo and the young people at GOSH. Jo often involves others in her art-making process, which is centred around conversation, print and play.
Together they explored the GOSH Arts collection, looking at how art impacts young people’s experiences of healthcare settings.
Extracts of these conversations are playfully displayed alongside the artworks to offer a fresh perspective on the collection, centring young voices at GOSH.
From print to photography to painting
The budding curators selected a diverse range of works across print, photography and painting. The exhibition features internationally renowned artists including Mona Hatoum, Chila Burman, Ian Davenport and Albert Irvin.
“The children and young people kept coming back to the abstract works rather than selecting the more figurative or illustrative pieces we had expected them to choose,” Jo says.
“I tried to draw out what prompted their choices and they described how something about the absence of form allowed them to place their own meaning on the works rather than being dictated to.”
Click through the gallery below to check out the exhibited pieces.
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Albert Irvin, Concordia III, 1997, screenprint with woodblock
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Chila Burman, Shine Light, 2020, mixed media
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Ian Davenport, Chromatastic, 2017, archival inkjet print
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John Crossley, Rocking and Rolling, 2023, screenprint, Ed. 3/20
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Katie Goodwin, Dawn of the Rainbow, 2012, screenprint
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Mona Hatoum, Bed springs (blue), 2018, lithograph, Ed. 8/10
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Rachel Duckhouse, Terraced Nacre 1, 2016, print
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Sophie Smallhorn, Layer 1, 2016, screenprint
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Tessa Shaw, Through the Parables of Sunlight, 2016, original cyanotype on paper
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Young-Jin Choi, West Sea of Korea 9, 2007, ultrachrome print
Helping young people build their own place to be
As part of the project, Jo created a new artwork, a beautiful risograph print entitled ‘A different place to be’.
It features a poem, made up of the insightful observations shared by young people at GOSH and an image of a flexible play structure, designed to allow children and young people to build their own place to be. The new artwork makes a wonderful and welcome new addition to the hospital's growing art collection.
Risograph (or Riso) printing combines elements of screen printing and photocopying to create an environmentally friendly way of producing zines, posters, flyers and more. Riso printing can produce unique shifts in alignment each time, so no two prints are the same.
Jo Brinton, A Different Place To Be, 2025, risograph print on paper
A big thank you
GOSH Arts would like to say a huge thank you to the 22 young people for taking part in these wards and outpatient areas: Caterpillar, Cheetah, CRF, Eagle, Falcon, Giraffe, Lion, Owl, Panther, Sight & Sound and X-Ray.
They all had the opportunity to receive a copy of the print, as a thank you from the artist for participating in the exhibition.
If you are a GOSH patient, sibling, parent or carer interested in participating in projects like this, you can sign up to GOSH Voice for future opportunities.
Patient, family and staff support
Childhood shouldn’t happen in hospital. But if it has to, we’re here to help make it the best it can be. Find out more about the support services we fund.