Honeyscribe: Plant Pharmacy Studio
Building on the work developed during a previous Creative Arc-funded project, Honeyscribe's Plant Pharmacy Studio will provide a series of free drop-in creative encounters for staff at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital in the staff area of TLC Café. At a time where staff morale is low across the NHS, and recruitment of healthcare professionals is causing nationwide concern, this project offers a creative way to bolster staff wellbeing of the hospital community. Honeyscribe will deliver engaging and contemplative sessions to boost staff wellbeing during their shifts led by skilled professional artists from Exeter who are experienced in working in complex hospital environments in NHS hospitals across the UK. Plant Prescriptions will be available to all staff from consultants to cleaners.
By setting up a ‘Plant Pharmacy Studio’ in the hospitals largest staff rest area, people can participate for as long as they have and receive expert tutorials in how to paint flowers from life and create pressed flower cards from a preserved collection of local wild and cultivated flowers from across the hospital campus, the University of Exeter Grounds and local gardens. In addition to the interactive sessions where people can connect with the making of botanical cards and artworks, Plant Pharmacists will dispense handmade botanical cards featuring real pressed samples of medicinal plants associated with healing. This approach was tested during the pilot project and found to have a powerful effect engaging people across the hospital, filtering through the staff community and enticing staff to seek out and engage with the activities, often whole departments engaging with the activities in relays over the course of a busy shift. Plants and placemaking are inextricably linked, and this project helps advocate the importance of biodiverse spaces across the NHS trust site set out in their Green Plan.
About Honeyscribe
Led by founder and Artist/Artistic Director Amy Shelton, Honeyscribe uses creative practice to draw attention to the intricate relationship between biodiversity, environmental wellbeing and human health. By creating artworks and imaginative participatory programmes that invite a re-evaluation of our relationship with the environment, their work helps connect people to the places they live, to our shared ecology and natural heritage.
Working across multiple forms and disciplines and in collaboration with a wide range of artists, writers, scientists, botanists, conservationists, researchers, architects, designers, Honeyscibe’s work focuses on how art can be a potent tool to reconnect people to the natural world and one another.
Honeyscribe work with NHS Trusts across the UK, devising projects and creating artworks that bring the natural world into the interior spaces of healthcare settings through biophilic design to help support staff and patient wellbeing. Recent NHS projects have been delivered at UCLH London, Dyson Cancer Centre Royal United Hospitals Bath, University Hospital Southampton & Great Ormond Street Childrens' Hospital.