On the first floor of Kentish Town Health Centre, a short walk from the waiting rooms where patients sit with their appointment letters, seven artists have hung work about the conditions that bring people through the door. ‘Tracing the Unseen’ runs until February 2027. It asks what chronic illness looks like when so much of it cannot be seen, from the way a body moves to what happens at cellular level.
Many of these conditions are under-researched or misdiagnosed, and living with them can be isolating. The exhibition responds with materials that hold memory. Beads and twigs gathered on short, familiar walks for example, give the room a sense of ritual, and the body is reimagined in forms that are stitched and felted, layered and moulded.
Embellished artwork by Catriona Faulkner. Photo: Helen Excell
The setting matters. Creative Health Camden is a charity working inside the health centre itself, taking patient referrals from two local GP practices through social prescribing and running creative workshops alongside dance classes for people with Parkinson’s. The exhibition is a collaboration with The Poorly Project, founded in early 2025 by Cengizhan Sen after a Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis turned him towards writing. The project gathers interviews and studio visits as ‘tales’, told by people who are, in its phrase, sick enough to tell the tale. Textile readers will recognise the instinct behind all of this as kinship. Cloth has long been how we look after each other, in blankets for the sick and quilts handed down through families, and the show extends that habit to a community of patients and practitioners, carers and advocates...
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Further Information:
Tracing the Unseen is on view until February 2027 in the Upper Gallery (1st floor), Kentish Town Health Centre, 2 Bartholomew Road, London NW5 2BX.
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Image Credits:
Lead: I Can Dance Again, embroidered artwork by Coco Warner-Allen. Photo: The Poorly Project
All further images as credited in captions.