Welcome
The Nightingale Project brightens up the environment in mental health services through art and music. We see it as vital to bring life and colour into a hospital or clinic setting to provide a conducive setting for medical and therapeutic work. To receive a patient in a hospital environment which is pleasant, cheerful, and welcoming can be seen as an essential first step in treatment, a fundamental contribution to the process of recovery. We are a charitable project that works with CNWL NHS Foundation Trust, a large mental health trust with many sites in the London area, to make the treatment environment more human and more uplifting for both inpatients and outpatients. We do this through putting on temporary exhibitions of high-quality art in waiting rooms, commissioning artists to produce beautiful works of art for permanent display in the wards, and through bringing musicians into hospitals to play live for the patients. The Project began at the South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre in 1998, and has since spread to numerous other sites. The Nightingale Project Fund is Charity no 1082989.
‘One Life to Live’:
Concert in Memory of Patrick O’Connor, 1949-2010
A concert in memory of Patrick O’Connor, writer, critic and broadcaster, will be held at 6.00pm on Wednesday 8th September at the Wigmore Hall, London.
The concert will be entitled ‘One Life to Live’, and will comprise music that Patrick loved – Francis Poulenc, Kurt Weill, Reynaldo Hahn, Ned Rorem and others – and will include a special tribute to Josephine Baker, the subject of one of Patrick’s books. Musicians will include Jonathan Dove, Lucy Schaufer, Paul Austin Kelly, Asako Ogawa, Susana Gaspar and Yoko Hirao. Admission is free; a collection will be taken in aid of two charities that Patrick supported, The Nightingale Project and the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund.
Time and place: Wigmore Hall, 36 Wigmore Street, London W1U 2BP. 6.00pm, Wednesday 8 September 2010.
Nightingale Project on TV Documentary
The Nightingale Project has been featured in a documentary on Phoenix CNE TV. The eight-minute piece can be seen on YouTube: click here.
Enhancing the Environment in Mental Health: Conference
Dr Nick Rhodes, Director of the Nightingale Project, chaired the recent national conference on Enhancing Mental Health Environments. An article about the conference appears here.
Collage by Richard Rodney Bennett
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett is internationally known as a composer – he has written all his life for the concert hall, for films such as Far from the Madding Crowd, Murder on the Orient Express and Four Weddings and a Funeral – as well as being a writer and performer of jazz cabaret songs. What is generally unknown is that in recent years this multi-talented musician has also developed a private passion for making collages. This is the first public exhibition of his work. Open 2nd June to 10th September at South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre. Monday to Friday 9.00am to 6.00pm.
Richard Rodney Bennett writes: “I started making collages about ten years ago, after brief flirtations with abstract painting and with fibre art. I use all kinds of found paper, paper which has been painted with acrylic and watercolour, and old shirts and ties. My collages are entirely abstract.
“After many years of trying to find a personal voice in my musical compositions, I have let myself be influenced in my collages by a number of distinguished artists. There is of course the grandfather of them all, Kurt Schwitters, but also five twentieth-century American collagists – Anne Ryan, Hannelore Baron, William Dole, Robert Nickle and Robert Courtright, and the school of abstract painters that was flourishing in France in the forties and fifties, notably Nicolas de Stael, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, Serge Poliakoff and Maurice Esteve. I cannot let my work be shown without acknowledging my debt to all these great artists. Nor can I fail to thank Stephen Barnham and Nick Rhodes of the Nightingale Project for their faith in me”.
News: The Independent’s “Ten Best Affordable Art” Feature
Prints by Quentin Blake that are on sale in aid of the Nightingale Project were featured in The Independent on Tues 6 April. See our Sales page.
Now Available: New set of hand-signed prints by Quentin Blake
Last year we installed a set of pictures by Quentin Blake at Northwick Park Hospital entitled ‘Our Friends in the Circus’. Individually-made, signed giclee prints of these images are now available – see Sales page.
All proceeds from your purchase of these images go to further the work of the Nightingale Project.