Healthcare Spaces & Community Art

I am a New England area artist who has worked with communities to create healing art for healthcare spaces, community gardens, and more. Natural paper art has the ability to improve health and well-being.

The Mind’s Eye: Natural Places in Paper

I visited 22 assisted living centers, nursing homes, hospice centers, and senior living homes in Rhode Island to make pulp paintings with each community, and collect each person’s stories and memories of favorite natural places they’ve been.

I printed their stories on extra paper I made, bound them into books, and installed the books on a modular structure. This work is able to be folded up and travel to different spaces, regardless of if they have a dedicated gallery space or not.

Viewers can pick up each book from its hanging to hold, read, and touch each circular book. The stories about natural places sparks conversation and connection between people as they talk about how they’ve been to that place, or talk about their own favorite natural places.

In 2019, a second iteration engaged northern New Hampshire elderly communities.

The Mind’s Eye: Natural Places in Paper, 25 pulp painting books made from pigment, linen rag, cotton paper scrap, Japanese knotweed, Codium fragile, corn husk, each book 7 in. x ¼ in. and installation 7ft x 2ft x 6ft.

MEMORIES text (North Country New Hampshire)

MEMORIES text (CareLink)

PRESS
One Step at a Time, Pawtucket Times, July 2017
The Creative Process on Display, Woonsocket Call, 2017
CareLink Celebrates 20 Years Helping Rhode Island Elderly, Johnston Sunrise, 2017
20 Years of Linking Elder Care Resources, Rhody Beat, 2017

This project was generously supported by amazing assistants, CareLink, and the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.

SCLT Galego Community Farm Projects

In 2017, the artist worked with Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT)’s Galego Community Farm and the Pawtucket Housing Authority Galego Court in Pawtucket RI to hold papermaking workshops using up garden weeds.

Pawtucket Paper Center

Babcock is a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow. With support from NAS, the UPenn Center for Social Impact Strategy, and the Barr Foundation, she piloted Pawtucket Paper Center in 2019. This was a creative place-making, community papermaking program that closed in 2020 with Covid-19.

¡CityArts! Plant Paper Community Installation

May worked with Providence ¡CityArts! youth, to explore relationships between plant and human histories, and their movements in South Providence via neighborhood exploration and plant-to-paper workshops.