A Brief History of Healing
Top: repurposing NHS curtains with patients at Llandough Hospital
Bottom: medication trolley repurposed
into mobile print station
2019-ongoing
Gail Howard is a visual artist and group facilitator based in Cardiff, with a socially engaged practice spanning more than 25 years. Specialising in community led collaboration she is a founder member of the PAM common art collective and co-founded the hyperlocal madeinroath arts festival in East Cardiff in 2009.
Howard’s practice centers communities and individuals who are lesser heard, and underrepresented in civic life, focusing on dialogue, inclusive engagement and a reimagining of societal structures.
Often using traditional creative practices and crafts, the work seeks to bring the outsider in, to embrace difference, and to reflect our, often failed, attempts to connect our inner world with the outer world. Howard’s solo work speaks to a kind of social and environmental discomfort with a particular interest in the freakshow element of popular culture, as characterised by the regular othering of the non-mainstream and the atypical.
Working intersectionally, across the realms of community, arts in health and the disability arts movement for many years, Howard specialises in creating and holding safe spaces for creativity and connection, addressing the barriers caused by social, economic, political and institutional exclusion.
PAM common art collective, 2024