About Us

The Care Lab is a space for exploring artful care and careful art.

The Lab hosts events, workshops, and commissions new projects. These have included a talk on care and poetry, a workshop on creating careful practices with children, an exhibition about caregivers and dementia, and a demonstration of what it means to care for collections. The Lab’s ambition is to create new narratives about what it means to care artfully, and make art carefully. 

The events are for everyday carers, healthcare professionals, artists, academics, activists and everyone interested in the practice of care. These are in person, hybrid and online. See our UPCOMING EVENTS page for current activities, and our PROJECT page for ongoing work.

We believe that care is a sensory and embodied practice that can be considered a craft or art form in its own right. At its best, care is an artful practice of repair for individuals, communities, and the world in which we live. We focus on the art-like qualities of the care we give, experience and receive.

The Lab has come out of a research project at the University of Manchester and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that has been looking at ‘Care Aesthetics’, where careful art and artful care are brought into dialogue. To find out more about the research, see PROJECTS.

The physical space of The Lab is in The Whitworth Art Gallery’s Care Collections Centre.