Healing: Art & Institutional Care

20 Aug to 9 Nov 2025

Artists: Fayen d’Evie, Carol Dobson, Jenny Hickinbotham, Helen Johnson, Alecia Neo, Finnegan Shannon and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Grace Wood

Curated by Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong

Healing: Art and Institutional Care is a group exhibition of contemporary and historic artworks that takes as its starting point the contested space of institutional care.

The exhibition draws from the Larundel Collection, and the unique Art Access Studio program led by artists at the former Larundel Mental Hospital (1953-1991), on what is now the grounds of La Trobe University (Bundoora Campus). Art Access Studio pioneered and challenged the ways in which art could be used therapeutically in psychiatric hospitals, shifting away from the artwork as a diagnostic tool, towards artmaking as an opportunity for self-directed healing.

Alongside select works from the Larundel Collection, exhibited with the permission of the makers, the exhibition includes newly commissioned and existing works by contemporary artists engaging critically with the ethics and limitations of institutional care. This includes works by artists whose practices draw from their lived experiences (of mental ill health, disability justice, neurodivergence and caregiving) to challenge the neutrality of institutional care and redraw its boundaries. In doing so, this exhibition traces how artists create relational possibilities for healing within institutions, in spite of them, and entirely outside them—through both historical precedents and contemporary practices that challenge, refuse and/or reimagine institutional forms of care.

Image: Finnegan Shannon and Sam Peterson, Do you want us here or not, 2023. Courtesy of the artists.