Open Spaces, St George's Medical School

Between 2019 and 2022, I acted as facilitator for the Open Spaces Programme at St George’s Medical School, working with Deborah Padfield. Open Spaces is the School’s programme of humanities provision, designed to supplement and expand the traditional curricula. Deborah and I met while I was working as an assistant EA, and supporting Open Spaces events eventually became the majority of my role.

This brought me into contact with a huge variety of practice — including comic illustration, life-drawing at the moment of death, gamelan, cyanotyping, remote movement workshops, meditation, textile representation of the body, social historical research of anatomical samples, singing for breathing and the use of pets as therapy. Learning to support such a wide range of practice has proved extremely useful as my career progresses, particularly in the provision of practical workshops like hands on with glue.

I’ve also developed quite a radical cross-disciplinary attitude as a result of this work. An amount of my facilitation was delivered virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic — Open Spaces workshops seemed to me to serve as an essential space for students to reflect and process during this traumatic period in the hospital’s history.