Dr Steve Fossey
The Art of Wellbeing (The Resilience Series)
The Resilience Series (Boston Norton Lea Hospital) are three permanent artworks commissioned by NHS mental health services. Creates as part of the Art of Wellbeing project (Fossey+Baynton), the work explored the relationship between art, place and wellbeing. Through sustained engagement with patients, staff and experts by experience, the project investigated how creative practice can contribute to environments that support recovery, reflection and human connection. Drawing upon research in neuroaesthetics, biophilic design and therapeutic landscapes, the work sought to create visual experiences that offer moments of pause, orientation and calm within complex healthcare settings. Combining participation, research and site-responsive practice, the project reflected an ongoing commitment to understanding how art can shape the ways people experience and inhabit shared spaces. The Art of Wellbeing has been shortlisted twice in the Design in Mental health Art Installation of the Year Awards.
A Trial Run in Our Skins
A Trial Run in Our Skins (Fossey+Bell, Project Space Plus and various sites in Lincolnshire.) brought together shared interests in intimacy, communication, social space and place. The project explored the relationships between human, animal, mineral and vegetal forms, questioning the boundaries that separate them.
Working across performance, video, sound and sculpture, the exhibition examined how identities, memories and experiences become entangled with landscapes, objects and histories. Through a series of interconnected works, Fossey+Bell navigated natural, cultural and imagined terrains, creating spaces for reflection on belonging, interconnection and the ways in which lives become woven into the stories of places and one another.
For Women's Amusement
Taking the legacy of botanist Joseph Banks as a point of departure, For Women's Amusement (in collaboration with Dr Alice Bell (Fossey+Bell , Project Space Plus, Lincoln, UK.) reconsiders the narratives that shape our understanding of botanical history and asks whose stories are remembered, recorded and celebrated. Overlooked women botanists and their hidden contributions, labour, knowledge and expertise were given voice in the project. Through acts of recovery and reinterpretation, the work reveals overlooked connections between plants, people and place, drawing attention to the networks of collaboration that underpin scientific and cultural knowledge. The project reflects upon the processes through which histories are constructed, inherited and revised, inviting audiences to reconsider relationships between gender,memory, representation and the natural world.
Conscious a to be
Conscious a to Be ( various sites, UK) examines the informal negotiations through which people move across the landscape. Focusing on the desire paths that emerge through repeated acts of passage, the work makes visible the often-overlooked decisions embedded within everyday movement.Temporary pathways constructed from black refuse sacks were installed along these worn traces during periods when the sites were unoccupied. Associated with waste, absence and transience, the materials disrupted familiar routes while simultaneously drawing attention to them. The work invited reflection on the subtle ways individuals reshape their environments through repeated acts of use, revealing the collective authorship of seemingly ordinary spaces.
Commemoration and Non-Place
Commemoration and Non-Place (various sites, UK was a series of temporary interventions installed within derelict and transitional sites across the East Midlands. Flowers were placed within the hoardings and barriers that separated public space from inaccessible interiors, transforming these provisional structures into sites of reflection and care.Positioned between memorial and gesture, the work explored how meaning can emerge in places often considered anonymous, overlooked or without history. As flowers fell from the barriers, passers-by were observed repositioning and tending to them, creating unanticipated acts of stewardship. Through these small interventions, the project considered how attachment, responsibility and remembrance might arise within spaces commonly understood as non-places.
A Found Letter and a Satsuma
A handwritten letter containing directions was discovered on a pavement outside the artist's home. Intended for someone unknown, the instructions nevertheless offered the possibility of a journey. Following the directions led to an office building where an unexpected encounter took place with the intended destination's occupant. What followed was a conversation about chance, authorship and coincidence, culminating in the exchange of a satsuma. A Found Letter and a Satsuma (The Power House, Victoria Studios, Nottingham, UK) explores what it means to inhabit a narrative not intended for you, tracing the ways that accidental discoveries can produce encounters, relationships and temporary communities. The work considers how meaning emerges through acts of following, misdirection and openness to the unforeseen.
Flat Lights
Flat Lights (Victoria Flats, Nottingham, UK) transformed a residential tower block into a temporary collective performance. Residents were invited by letter to switch their lights on and off at specific moments whilst the artist observed from a nearby building.Without meeting one another, participants became collaborators in a dispersed choreography of illumination. The work explored questions of community, visibility and collective action, revealing how individual gestures can contribute to a shared event without requiring direct contact or coordination.
Between You and Me...
Between You and Me... (Victoria Studios and various sites, UK) emerged through a series of walks during which handwritten notes were left for strangers to discover. These fragments of thought, positioned within the landscape, acted as temporary markers of reflection, uncertainty and encounter.Across installations, performances and publications, the project explored walking as a means of thinking and the landscape as a site for dialogue. Brackets, benches, sunrises and sunsets recur throughout the work as metaphors for beginnings, endings and the structures that support us during moments of transition.
Architectures of Growth
Commissioned by The Future Factory at Bonington Gallery, Architectures of Growth (Nottingham, UK) examined Nottingham's lace-making heritage at a moment of significant urban change. Hundreds of roses were tied to railings surrounding the future site of Nottingham Contemporary using redundant Nottingham lace transported by a third-generation lace maker's barrow.As the flowers wilted and the lace slowly deteriorated, the installation became a meditation on labour, memory and transformation. The work reflected on how places acquire meaning through cycles of growth, decline and renewal, and how histories persist within changing urban landscapes.
The Nottingham Bells
The Nottingham Bells (Nottingham, UK and Queensland, AU) reconnected two communities separated by geography but linked through a shared history. In 1956, two bells were removed from Nottingham and gifted to a school in Queensland, Australia, after complaints about their sound.Nearly half a century later, the bells were rung live from Australia and broadcast back into the Nottingham street from which they had once sounded. Connecting two continents through a shared sonic event, the work explored memory, migration and the enduring relationships that emerge through acts of exchange.
Walking Through the Field
Walking Through the Field (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK) forms part of an ongoing investigation into walking, drawing and social encounter. Combining personal narratives, GPS technologies and embodied movement, the work produces layered cartographies that blur distinctions between memory, place and representation.The project considers site as a continually evolving assemblage of trajectories, relationships and experiences. Through walking together, sharing stories and tracing movement through technological systems, the work explores how places are produced through the intersection of multiple lives and histories.
Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible
Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible (Loughborough University and online) was selected for the international exhibition Drawn to Time, curated by Susan Kemenyffy. The work responds to drawing's temporal condition, exploring the relationship between mark-making, duration and embodied presence.
Positioned within expanded approaches to drawing, the project considers how traces, gestures and acts of attention make visible the passage of time, transforming drawing from a static object into an ongoing process of becoming.
Thought Acts
Commissioned by the Liberated Words Festival and exhibited at Arnolfini, Bristol, Thought Acts (Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK) explores the relationship between language, movement and landscape. Filmed during a train journey through the English countryside, the work captures fleeting moments in which sunlight animates a performance script resting beside the window.
The piece examines how meaning emerges through movement and circumstance, positioning language as something continually shaped by place, duration and perception. Thought Acts forms part of an ongoing exploration of walking, writing and the poetics of everyday encounters.
I Will Tell You That I Love You and Mean It
I Will Tell You That I Love You and Mean It (Fringe Arts Festival, Bath, UK) invited gallery visitors to enter into a simple yet unfamiliar exchange. Envelopes distributed throughout the exhibition contained the artist's telephone number and an instruction to make contact.Those who called were invited to say "I love you". The response was always the same: "I love you too, and I mean it."The work explored sincerity, vulnerability and the social conventions that govern expressions of affection. Through a brief encounter between strangers, it questioned how intimacy might emerge through language alone.
Hello, I Love You
Commissioned for A Better Tomorrow at Embrace Arts, Leicester, Hello, I Love You (, Embrace Arts Centre, Leicester, UK) invited participants into a one-to-one encounter structured around conversation, listening and trust.Separated physically yet connected through a telephone call and a length of rope held by both artist and participant, intimate conversations unfolded around love, memory, loss and personal experience. The work explored the conditions through which closeness emerges between strangers, questioning how vulnerability and connection can be produced through carefully constructed acts of exchange.
Host(s)
Commissioned by the Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival, Host(s) (European Arts and Theatre Festival, UK) expanded the concerns of Host into a larger-scale participatory performance involving fifty audience-participants.Over the course of an evening, visitors were hand-fed food prepared on site whilst invited to share personal histories, memories and confessions. The work positioned hospitality as a framework through which relationships might be formed, exploring how trust emerges through acts of care, generosity and exchange. By foregrounding food as both material and social medium, the performance examined the thresholds between self and other, host and guest, public and private.
Host
Commissioned by Little Wolf Parade, Host (, Little Wolf Parade, UK) explored hospitality as a performative and relational act. Audience-participants were hand-fed food prepared on site in exchange for stories, memories and personal reflections.Through the simple act of feeding and being fed, the work examined trust, proximity and social openness. Conversations ranged from the mundane to the deeply personal, transforming a shared meal into a space for exchange, confession and encounter. Host formed part of an ongoing investigation into intimacy, participation and the social dynamics of strangers meeting.
