'What do you, we, I see?'

This creative-research collaboration between artist Daniel Regan and Dr Sarah Yardley explores the role of relationships and relationship-centred approaches to healthcare. The project focused on Palliative Care and Mental Healthcare as two areas that depend on relationships between service users, family and friends who support them and a wide range of health and social care professionals.

The images were co-produced with a group of research participants as part of the research process with the intention of also using these to engage a wider audience in conversation about the issues raised by the research.

The exhibition consists of a series of six photographs produced by Daniel Regan in response to working with the research team and workshop participants with lived experience of Palliative Care, Mental Healthcare or both as service users, carers or service providers. 

Daniel writes "Care has been an important theme throughout my life and work. As a young person I often cared for my mentally unwell mother, and vice versa as I grew older with my own difficulties. For two decades we delicately oscillated between the carer and the cared for and its associated challenges. I am fascinated by the caring roles that we explore in our relationships, the complexity of difference in what it means to be cared for individuals, and how systems can foster or prohibit caring environments. What happens when people are treated as systems? Who fits into these systems and who is left outside? How can medical professionals work with patients in an individualised way whilst within the confines of rigid healthcare systems?

Responding to the key themes in Sarah’s research this abstract series of images explores the necessity for fluidity within systems of care, reflecting on themes of synchronicity, fragility and impermanence."