.

.

[Un]easy Listening | 2024 – 2025

.

“The message of not being listened to, is that what you are saying is not important…you are not important.” – Sara Ahmed

.

[Un]easy Listening: Conversations on Care is a youth-led, artist centred, collaborative photography project which explores experiences and understandings of mental health and care. The project was driven by the recognition that young people’s voices are often absent from the discussions about mental health services and support systems, and that many feel unseen and unheard but the people, institutions and support systems who aim to ‘care’.

Young people worked alongside Kate to find new ways to represent these conversations of care – those experienced and ones we imagine, or hope could go differently. The work considers the sites which hold such conversations, both the spaces that they take place and in the somatic spaces of how our bodies hold conversations around care and their emotions.

Through reflecting on the complexities and contradictions of what it means to hold conversations around mental health, we attempt to find a way to go beyond what is spoken, to explore the shape of those conversations, recognising that remains unsaid, what spills and in doing so, consider the ways we can listen to each other, hear each other and care for each other and ourselves more fully.

.

.

The work was co-produced by Adam | Anon | Anna | El Macho | Isabel | Kate | Nathan | Rufshana | Tanaka | Xen

.

[Un]easy Listening was commissioned by Impact on Urban health as part of an evidence building process to develop creative approaches to supporting children and young people’s mental health, and create more equitable, community led models of mental health support.

.

The work was exhibited at Oxford House, Bethnal Green in 2025

.