Care, Create, Conserve – A Heritage Reflection with SUIT

As part of the Care, Create, Conserve project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, I had the privilege of working with Corey, John, Matt, and Sally—members of Wolverhampton’s Service User Involvement Team (SUIT)—to explore healthcare heritage through a creative lens.

Hosted by The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust’s Arts and Heritage Group, the project invited us to reflect on how attitudes toward mental health and addiction have shifted (or not) over time. We used medical artefacts from the Trust’s collection—some dating back to 1840—as prompts for discussion and creative response.

Our sessions were held inside the city’s first Healthcare Heritage Centre at Central Library. Surrounded by objects of care and cure, we talked about stigma, perception, and lived experience. We asked: has treatment evolved faster than public understanding? What does recovery look like when viewed through the lens of history?

The conversations were honest, raw, and deeply insightful. Together, we began shaping a multi-media artwork that speaks to the shared challenges of conserving heritage and caring for people’s whole health—mental, physical, and emotional.

Artwork Spotlight: A Journey through Care and Recovery

At the heart of this project is a triptych artwork titled A Journey through Care and Recovery—a collaborative piece shaped by lived experience, historical reflection, and creative response.

Prescribing Our Past

This panel captures the historical collection—vintage bottles and containers that once held medicinal treatments, many of which included addictive ingredients. It invites us to consider how care was once administered, and how the legacy of those treatments still echoes in today’s conversations around addiction and recovery.

Chasing the Dragon

A vivid, symbolic panel that reflects the struggle with substances and the concept of self-medication. Poppies—representing the natural origin of opium—are layered with the face and body of a dragon, a visual metaphor for chasing something dangerous and elusive. It’s a reckoning with the seductive pull of addiction and the chaos it can bring.

Fragments of Recovery

This final panel portrays the ongoing journey of healing. The entire canvas background is collaged with medication leaflets—pain relief, detox support, and mental health prescriptions—forming a textured foundation of lived experience. A blue-toned face floats above, with the phrase “POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS” anchoring the tension between treatment and transformation.

Together, these panels form a shared conversation—a lifeline, a testament, and a reflection of survival. The artwork now lives within the Healthcare Heritage Centre, currently at Wolverhampton City Archives, offering visitors a glimpse into the emotional and historical layers of care.

I’m grateful to Corey, John, Matt, and Sally for their openness, and to Elinor Cole and the Arts & Heritage team for holding space with such care. This project reminded me that storytelling—especially when rooted in lived experience—is a powerful tool for change.

For more on the project’s background and the Trust’s perspective, you can read the official press release from RWT NHS Charity here:

https://www.rwtnhscharity.co.uk/news/project-draws-on-the-past-to-explore-the-present/