Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales

Art in Covid-19 field hospitals

When the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, Public Health Wales announced that it would build field hospitals across Wales to double NHS capacity.

Unlike permanent hospitals, these buildings were repurposed, sometimes temporary spaces that have one thing in common, the walls were bare. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’s challenge was to transform some of these spaces into art galleries.

By working in partnership with Arts Council Wales, and with support from the Welsh Government, Amgueddfa Cymru devised Celf ar y Cyd, a series of ambitious visual art projects that challenge us to share the art collection across Wales during the crisis.

By working with health boards across Wales, our brief was to make people feel at home, and to act quickly so that the spaces would be ready to receive their first patients.

As the Covid-19 pandemic worsened over the winter, and the pressure on NHS staff increased, we continued to take the art collection into hospitals to provide inspiration and solace for staff and patients.

At the start of February 2021, a new Staff Haven facility opened at the UHW Health Hospital site in Cardiff, partly funded through a charity run by Welsh footballer Gareth Bale and his family, to support NHS staff wellbeing.

We invited hospital staff to choose which artworks they would like to see and overwhelmingly, the favourite theme was nature. A selection of paintings was made which attempt to bring the magic of the outdoors, indoors, using huge reproductions of the paintings which stretch from floor to ceiling.

The next stage of the project will be to bring poetry to the walls, and new
writing is being commissioned from two Welsh poets, Hannan Issa and Elan
Grug. Inspired by the paintings, the poetry will be written to offer fresh perspectives and new ways of thinking about art, the natural landscape, and the importance it has to us all, particularly in hard times.

Amgueddfa Cymru continues to hold conversations with health boards across Wales to find new approaches to ensure that the art collection can be used by NHS teams and patients in a way that works for them, both online and in the workplace.