King's College London

As part of Welcome Week 2023, King’s Culture hosted a series of creative workshops in the Arcade, Bush House, exploring the topic of care. Led by professional transdisciplinary artist Demelza Watts, new and returning students came together to discuss their ideas about how care might exist in a community.

Through collage, painting, drawing, and using found items around the campus like maps, leaves or twigs, each participant produced a page that illustrated a method of care they would like to share.

The finished publication of over 100 pages has been curated into a digital pdf and is available for the King’s community as a resource to read, share and find comfort in.

As the final catalogue celebrates, care can exist in many forms; a recipe, a poem, a favourite place, a supportive statement, a greeting, a tip about the quickest travel routes, a cat meme, a piece of wisdom, or a space and the permission to breathe deeply.

The ‘Catalogue of Care’ workshops were part of King’s Culture’s mission to facilitate creative exchange and collaboration, including engaging King’s students in contemporary challenges with imagination.

These workshops were intended to look specifically at ways of showing and receiving care at a moment when students can feel daunted at the prospect of going to university, including moving to London for the first time. The workshops were a creative way of supporting King’s commitment to developing a thriving student community and embedding a whole-university approach to student mental health and wellbeing.