Rudy Loewe: Intimacies of Care – Spaces of Grief and Possibility

This side of this light sculpture represents what Loewe and their workshop participants have experienced when seeking care. On the other side are the kinds of care they dream of. The double-sided format symbolises the gap between the two. Its grid layout references a bingo card, with the hope that improved care will one day provide more options for support.

From an early age you learn “we don’t ask for help”, not from doctors, hospitals or the police. But willingly or unwillingly, you find yourself in the GP surgery/hospital/psychiatric unit. And at this moment of need, you are told “you’re fine/ you need to calm down/ you’re making a big deal out of nothing. You’re/you’re/you’re”. There is no witness to your grief.

But there are seeds sown within you of what care could look like. Long-forgotten practices or treatments the GP would laugh away as inconceivable. In your spirit, you know it to be possible.

This work is only possible because I have been held together now for many years by a community of disabled co-conspirators who have buoyed my spirit with loving whispers; through tender voice notes, attending appointments and raging on my behalf when all the energy has left my body. ‘Intimacies of Care’ is inspired by Mia Mingus’s ‘access intimacy’, which she describes as “the intimacy [she feels] with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives”.

In these intimate spaces, we* hold each other’s grief and dream new possibilities of care. The care that we are yet to receive from the state, and that we may never receive from such a place.

* The ‘we’ here are the QTIBPOC (queer, trans, intersex, Black people and people of colour) disabled people I have lovingly felt in community with.

This scene reflects how Black people’s encounters with the police can escalate when someone in need of care is perceived as a threat. The police form a barrier between the viewer and the figure, reflecting the anger, fear and helplessness of witnessing such an encounter, unable to intervene. The larger canvas behind references a workshop in which one participant depicted rage as a flame-headed figure.

You witness the way those around you are treated as “threat” when they need care. You learn to make yourself small, to tend to your wounds, and turn your rage inwards. It takes years for you to meet healers who say, “But of course racism. Of course homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, ableism, structural violence.” Of course, of course, of course.

A Rage whirls within you and they tell you that it does not exist, that it need not exist, that you do not exist. There is nothing wrong with you unless you are a threat, in which case you are locked up and/or medicated “for your own good”. But that Rage, left restricted and ignored, seeps into your bloodstream like a poison that must be released.

This painting shows care as a community effort following the death of a loved one. Loewe uses the symbol of white lilies to signify loss, and pictures people gathering to tend to the bereaved. This evokes the Caribbean practice of Nine Nights, a funeral custom where family and friends gather for nine consecutive nights to mourn and celebrate the person who has died.

A rupture has taken hold of your world. There is no time. Nothing passes, just the grief that grips you like an enveloping darkness. And in this moment (“was it a moment? a month? a year?”), a community cares for you like loving gardeners tending to seedlings that might not last the first frost. Rubbing oils into your dry skin, cracked with mourning. Providing sweet care and shining light into that eternal shadow.

You find yourself stranded within your own body.

Overstimulated/untethered/out of spoons/in need of rest and lost at sea.

This space comes as a raft in the chaos. A place to ground and gather yourself, an invitation to stillness. If you wish to listen to the audio pieces, they are created to journey with you. But you may also wish to just be.

In ‘The Space Within’, Loewe creates an opportunity for rest and reflection away from the overwhelming environment of the city. The warm tones of the interior evoke red-light therapy, which studies suggest can help reduce anxiety. Once inside, you are invited to get comfortable and experience sound pieces that the artist has created. You can stay for a few moments, or for as long as you want.

This sculpture is modelled on four hands clasped together. The voices coming from it are those of Loewe’s workshop participants. You are welcome to embrace the sculpture or put your ear to it to listen. When the sculpture ‘activates’, the hands unfurl, creating an intimate place to sit and gather. Housed within the sculpture are healing plants and a painting of the tinder fungus, traditionally used to carry fires.

Here, a place to dream
Of new possibilities
For community care structures
Unforeseen

Held in the loving touch
Of all those known and unknown
Who have buoyed us/you
Through the weight
Of living
Like hands that have carried
Us to new ground
Across unsteady waves
So we might
Root and grow
Into elderships
Neverseen

Lovingly whisper
In many tongues
You are safe now
You are here
You are here
You are here

This painting is adapted from Loewe’s conversations with workshop participants. The demands they list reflect an understanding that barriers in the mental health care system cannot be separated from wider issues that limit people’s access to support and autonomy, such as cuts to disability benefits. The term ‘carceral care’ refers to forms of ‘care’ that resemble prisons, such as detainment and restraint.

This list of demands is adapted from workshops I co-facilitated with Camille Sapara Barton. We reimagined what care could look like when lived experience is centred and people have the power to make decisions for themselves and those they love.

As part of this work, I am sending this list of demands to the current government, highlighting the necessary changes in the mental health system to centre community care.

You can find out more about the petition here.

This painting is about healing rooted in ancestral and spiritual practices. The candles symbolise people coming together to heal as “a sea of flickering hope and light” in the dark, inspired by a Roy Witcher poem. Loewe discussed this idea with their workshop participants, having found the poem in a 1990s newsletter called ‘Sisters of the Yam’, produced by the Black Women’s Mental Health Project.

We make sweet friends with the weight of sadness
And attend to the unseen, that which we are not allowed to name
Without fear of incarceration.
We erupt with creativity in the depths of the night
As everyone else sleeps
The silence and deep dark
Lighting up those chasms
Quiet voices that become clearer now
Without the constant echo of daily living
We engage in prayer and a divine solitude
Drawing nearer to Spirit.
We sing songs into the wind
Dry-mouthed and breathless
Knees bent, hands held out
In surrender.
Nothing but the light of a flame
To remind us that we are still here

In this film, Rudy Loewe shares the thinking and making process behind their new commission and what prompted them to develop this project. The team of designers behind the exhibition discuss how Loewe’s principle of embedding care throughout the project informed their approach to design.