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We catch up with Creative Heritage Resident Artist, Zafeerah Heesambee, half way through her residency with Arts St George's to hear about what she's been up to so far.

Last Spring, we were delighted to announce that Zafeerah Heesambee would be joining us as our new Creative Heritage Resident Artist. This role engages patients, staff and local community groups on the ongoing National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project, 'Our Hospital: Conserving, Curating and Responding to St George’s Art and Heritage Collection'. 

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you’ve approached the role of ‘Creative Heritage Resident Artist’

I’m an artist and producer with a socially engaged practice. I’ve led work across large-scale public art programmes, as well as more local, community-based programmes in London, connecting the threads between arts, culture, social justice and education. A lot of my career has been about making things more accessible to wider audiences and connecting the dots between different communities and movements.

As an artist, my practice brings together printmaking, illustration and ceramics, while exploring themes of memory, dreams and pattern-making, somewhere between the conscious and subconscious.

I was drawn to this residency at St George’s Hospital because I’ve become more interested in creative health over the last couple of years. I care about how we can connect art, history, making and storytelling, as well as creating spaces to slow down and nurture ourselves and each other. I’d also never worked in a hospital environment before, so I was really interested in connecting with new communities through the residency and learning more about how things run within a healthcare setting.

You have been involved in facilitating an exciting new partnership project between St George’s Hospital Charity and Wandsworth Carers’ Centre. Can you share a bit more about how these workshops developed and any key moments from the initiative?

I think the key to any community project is building a foundation of trust. So, this project started with a co-design collage session with Wandsworth Carers’ Centre. It was an opportunity for me to learn about the carers, and for them to learn about me and my practice. It also gave us a chance to see what creative mediums they were interested in and what kind of journey they wanted to go on during the sessions. The carers shared that they wanted a space to pause and exist beyond their caring responsibilities for a few hours. So, it was important for me when shaping each session, that they were able to unearth different parts of themselves and channel their energies through making.

As the workshops progressed, we explored a range of different mediums while reflecting on the heritage pieces from St George’s collection - from gouache, to printmaking, to clay and ceramics.

I loved inviting the group into my world of making and seeing how they took a simple prompt and developed their own ideas from it. There were lots of moments where they took something I had introduced and made it completely their own. One of my favourite moments was when we were experimenting with clay, and one of the participants went outside and got flowers to press into a photo frame she was making. Clay has memory, it remembers the hands, the marks, the sculpting. Flower-pressing felt symbolic of that.

Has anything surprised you in the residency so far?

​​​​As the workshops progressed, I understood more about the commitments and challenges of being a carer. That made me think about how I could tune and adapt the workshops to reflect the different paces of everyone in the room.

For example, we started sessions with journaling and gave more time for each activity. That created a bit more space for everyone to arrive and settle into the session, while also making sure that those who were more eager to get started still felt like the session had begun.

I think that flexibility has been important. Rather than expecting everyone to engage in the same way or at the same pace, I’ve had to pay more attention to what the group needed in each session and allow the workshops to respond to that.

What are you most looking forward to in the rest of your residency?

I’m really looking forward to working with the Trust’s Women’s Staff Network. I’m curious to learn more about the network, and to explore new themes and conversations with them.

The project will align with Menopause and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I’m keen to make work that really resonates with the experiences of women and healthcare. I’m interested to see where those conversations take us and what the group brings into the process.

I’m also looking forward to St George’s Arts Week and, of course, seeing everything come together in the final exhibition. I’m excited to curate the final artworks and string together the stories, experiences and conversations that have taken shape through the residency.

Finally… is there an artwork which has particularly caught your eye so far?

There’s two! Blease Apparatus I by Stephen Chaplin and Four Tootings, South London Street Scenes by Paul Clements - the whole collection, really, so technically that’s five.

I love the paintings for their vibrancy. Blease Apparatus is made up of primary colours and shapes, which I find really satisfying. It documents medical equipment that came about in the 1940s, so I like that there’s this record of something from the hospital’s history, but it’s also visually really striking.

Then Four Tootings is this eclectic capture in time of Tooting Broadway in the 1990s. I find it interesting how the views are skewed in the paintings, which creates an even more chaotic feeling.

Both pieces are quite unlike the work I would naturally make. There are more shapes and precision in them, whereas my own style is more fluid and flowy. I think it’s been interesting to bring those works into the workshops alongside my practice, and see how the carers respond to them and interpret them in their own ways.

Thank you Zafeerah! We look forward to seeing the next steps of the residency.

Arts St George’s (part of St George’s Hospital Charity) is the arts programme for St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. To find out more, follow us on socials @artsstgeorges, or follow Arts St George's - St George's Hospital Charity.   

'Our Hospital: conserving, curating and responding to St George’s Art and Heritage Collection’  is a three-year project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and made possible by money raised by National Lottery players. The project is focusing on conserving, cataloguing, reinterpreting and digitising St George’s Hospital’s unique Art and Heritage Collection so it can be enjoyed by many more people. 

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