I wandered into the Wellcome Collection the other day and found myself staring at a sculpture sprouting herbs and whispering sound installations. Not the usual fare for a place that once housed enough medical oddities to make your skin crawl. Yet here we are with Rudy Loewe's Intimacies of Care – Spaces of Grief and Possibility, which opened on 10 July and hangs around until February next year. It feels less like an exhibition and more like a quiet indictment of a system that chews people up and spits them out.
Loewe, working with grassroots outfits like ADHD Babes, the Black Trans Foundation and Black and Neurodiverse, has put together sculpture, paintings, text pieces and sound works that put the lived reality of Black Britons front and centre. You know the grim numbers already: Black people here are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than white people, and far too often they're turned away when they actually ask for help. The art doesn't lecture. It simply refuses to look away.
Take the Activation Sculpture from this year, a big sprawling thing that hosts intimate live events, dotted with plants like tinder fungus and damiana. These aren't random decorative touches. They're tied to ideas of energy, healing and keeping things sustainable. The whole piece feels like a deliberate middle finger to the cold institutional machinery that passes for care in too many NHS corridors.
The text works grew out of workshops with the very people who've been on the sharp end. The Search for Care / The Lack of Care and List of Demands don't pull punches. Neither do the new paintings. One shows two Black figures wrapped in spiritual healing, surrounded by symbols pulled from folklore. Another, called Rage, plants a lone Black person in flames while police officers circle like vultures. You don't need a curator's note to feel the anger and exhaustion baked into every brushstroke.
At its core this show keeps circling back to human dignity. Not the slogan version, the real one: treating people as individuals who deserve support that actually fits them rather than some bureaucratic tick-box exercise. Loewe puts it plainly: "Central to Intimacies of Care – Spaces of Grief and Possibility are Black people’s lived experiences of the mental healthcare system and the community practices we create in lieu of getting the support we need. By inviting visitors to consider alternative approaches to care, my hope is that people see there are other possibilities outside of the system we currently live in."
Curator Madeleine Kennedy echoes the same restless spirit. "One of the pillars of Wellcome Collection’s mission is to platform a radical imagination of what health is and what it could be. In their commission, Rudy Loewe models what this means in practice, collaborating with people affected by racism in the mental healthcare system to collectively dream of more just and abundant forms of care, and inviting visitors to join in this reimagining through a restful space that shares lineages of community care structures and healing practices."
