Blog: Caring for communities as well as collections

Dr Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath, reflects on the importance of creative health work and the impact of the Pathways to Wellbeing programme:

“Coming from a large national institution, when I arrived at the Holburne nearly eight years ago, I had no idea of the important creative health work the museum and its partners were doing to increase access to culture and creative opportunities for people in the surrounding community. Pathways to Wellbeing is our programme of supported, creative groups with participants who have lived experience of mental health issues and social isolation progressing from one group to another as they develop greater creative independence. I feel deeply privileged to have watched Pathways grow and evolve and humbled by the visible, positive impact it has on so many individuals’ lives. Those people are not huge in number but they engage so closely with the museum and its collection, making true our claim to be ‘changing lives through art’. As a colleague once said to me, we focus so much on the broad audiences who engage with our institution widely but not so profoundly, and less on the constituencies which may be only ‘an inch wide but a mile deep’.

I am so grateful to the many people who have nurtured the programme from our committed staff and creative facilitators to the support workers and museum volunteers, including some who have come through the programme themselves. For two three-year periods, Pathways to Wellbeing was supported by the National Lottery Community Fund and since then we have been funded  by a number of local charitable trusts. The lack of long-term, secure funding is a problem.

My especial gratitude goes to the many participants who overcome all sorts of challenges to come together to engage with the Holburne and its partner museums, and to make art of great quality and humbling honesty and integrity. As much as they benefit from the activities, so do we at the museum as our collections are opened up to new meanings and interpretations, and the ethos of Pathways to Wellbeing has come to provide the heart of the Holburne’s identity.

Now, as the programme develops further, we are thinking increasingly in terms of the museum as a care-full space. Museums have, traditionally, been places where objects have been cared for to ensure their longevity, often meaning keeping them away from people. We want to reverse these relationships so it is the people for whom we care first and foremost, providing a safe space for meaningful encounters with works of art from the past and from our own time, where those objects – wonderful, beautiful and evocative though they might be – are subservient to the people for whom they have been preserved. We see the museum is a place of encounter and it is only in coming together with people that the exhibits come alive. Without people’s engagement, a museum is nothing but a receptacle of inanimate objects. We each bring our own experiences and subjectivities, and they shape how we view, understand, analyse, and reflect what we see. That is why I always say that we at the Holburne learn as much from the Pathways groups as they might from the Museum.

Key to the success of Pathways is that it combines people’s responses to the museum and its contents with the development of their own creative expression. This is now at the very heart of how we think of the Holburne, a home for artefacts from the past that is also a centre for current creativity. To that end, each three-year season of Pathways creativity has culminated in an exhibition of art works by the participants, artistic mentors, volunteers and staff. This year we have been inviting participants (past and present), museum volunteers and our creative facilitators and support workers to explore how we experience care (or a lack of care) in our everyday lives and interactions. We’ve supported people to express these ideas, feelings and embodied experiences through making and creating. Our museum is full of objects which have been hand-made with immense care and skill – how do we connect with these things and make our own resonant objects?”

The Shape of Care exhibition at the Holburne Museum  – 24 Jan to 10 May, 2026

For more information about Pathways to Wellbeing visit:

https://holburne.org/learning-and-creativity/mental-health-and-creativity/

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