Nurses: Being Seen. Being Heard. Being.
Clore Learning Centre, Kensington Palace · May 2026
Our 2026 exhibition and summit ran at the Clore Learning Centre, Kensington Palace, 27-29 May 2026, with Art of Nursing CIC as curator and Community Access Partner with Historic Royal Palaces. The programme brought together creative work about nursing identity, migration, mental health, menopause, HIV, public health, memory and nursing care, including the stories of nurses working with people with HIV in the 1980s, SHIFT the play, Embers of Care, the Cape of Home, Health, Hope, Mrs Drake’s Lace, Menopause: Can You See Me Now?, Charlotte Mann’s table from Secrets of 179 Burnt Ash Hill, and the Heads of Nursing installations. Artists whose work featured included Charlotte Mann, Nicky Riding, Kitty Cameron and John Yayen, whose 80-metre banner carried 80 personal portraits of attendees on the palace railings. Contributing organisations included the Burdett Trust, The Foundation of Nursing Studies, NHS Charities, DHSC, the National Centre for Creative Health, HIVStory, the National Arts in Hospitals Network, Historic Royal Palaces and Rosetta Life. The summit ended with a collective call to action: creative health is essential, and the challenge is to turn the summit’s energy into sustained action in practice, leadership, research, education and policy.
A collective call to action
Creative health is essential. The next step is sustained action in practice, leadership, research, education and policy.
Explore the evidence
Stories, portraits and ways of knowing.
Follow the Heads of Nursing into practice
Images supplied by Art of Nursing CIC and the NCCH summit report. Click an image to enlarge it.
People and conversations
Nurses, artists, health leaders and partners came together to explore how creative health can help nursing flourish.
Queens and Vaccines:
the palace health tour
Written and led by Dr Marion Lynch for summit guests, the Queens and Vaccines Health Tour connected royal history with public health, women’s leadership and the power of art to shape a public conversation. Stories of Queen Caroline and Queen Charlotte opened discussion of smallpox, inoculation, risk and trust. The Three Queens of Mysore painting offered another perspective on how images communicate health messages across cultures.
The tour also linked with The Last Princesses of Punjab, exploring women’s voices, votes and support for refugees. On the King’s Staircase, William Kent’s mural invited reflection on whose faces and stories are represented. A comparison with John Yayen’s contemporary portraits connected the palace’s eighteenth-century court with the nurses, artists, educators and leaders gathered for the exhibition: two communities, centuries apart, made visible through art.
Three films to watch.
Nursing Creative Health SIG Summit
A short film from the 28 May 2026 summit at the Clore Learning Centre, Kensington Palace, hosted by Art of Nursing CIC with NCCH and The Foundation of Nursing Studies.
Watch the summit filmCape of Home, Health, Hope
A century-long story of nursing, migration and belonging, making nursing legacies and nurses visible through the artefacts of nursing.
Watch the Cape filmNurses. Being Seen. Being Heard. Being. The Artful Intelligence Revolution
There is more we can do together.
Bring us a question, a story, an idea.