Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund Scotland, Caring for the Collection is a project that will focus on Art in Healthcare’s vast art collection, enabling us to undertake a programme of maintenance and conservation of artworks currently in our art store.
We are delighted to have the support to recruit two technical roles, who will be dedicated to working with collection artworks and improving how they are stored safely. In November, we appointed Giulia Gentili, our Technician, who brings several years of experience working with a wide range of artists and organisations as an art technician, fabricator and artist.
Followed by the recruitment of our Collection Technician Apprentice, Mina Brennan, who will work closely alongside Giulia. Together, they will review, maintain and restore artworks, with the aim of placing them in hospitals, care homes and community spaces across Scotland. In addition to gaining hands on experience working with the collection, Mina will gain a Museum and Galleries Technician Modern Apprenticeship [SCQF level 7] qualification.
As part of this project, and to celebrate Art in Healthcare’s 35th Anniversary, Mina has launched a blog exploring 35 works from the Art in Healthcare Collection and her findings from her apprenticeship.
Image: ‘Eight Lines II’ by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a painter and printmaker whose work focuses on form, light and colour. Barns-Graham had synaesthesia, a condition where senses cross over — for example, one may taste colours or hear shapes. This condition meant that colour and form were always a huge part of her life. Many of her notebooks show pages of sketches where she applied a number code to colours or noted how colours corresponded to certain words. It might be because of this that Barns-Graham felt it extremely important to study art at Edinburgh College of Art, despite her father’s disapproval.
After graduating, Barns-Graham travelled to St Ives, where she heard there was a community of modern artists. Pretty soon after arriving, she moved into a studio in the same building as the St Ives Society for Artists, where she met many like-minded people, including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Her time there was very influential: she painted the Cornish landscape and her surroundings, as well as exhibiting alongside her peers. The St Ives group of artists were pioneers of modern art at the time, all pushing painting and sculpture forward, with landscape at the front of their subject matter.
In 1949, Barns-Graham visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. This enormous natural form would have a long-lasting effect on her. A quote from Barns-Graham sums up her constant wish to capture nature and its shapes: “Nature is so exciting. Trying to catch one simple statement about it. That’s what I’m aiming for. I’ll keep trying.” Barns-Graham made over 100 paintings about the glacier.
This piece from our collection, titled Eight Lines II, is a print from 2001. Wilhelmina didn’t begin focusing intently on printmaking until she was 80. In 1995, she worked with printmaker Rachael Kantaris, who helped her to print many pieces, including Eight Lines II. Kantaris remembers Barns-Graham feeling nervous to etch the lines for the print, as she wanted them to be perfect.
Inspired by the Cornish coast, Eight Lines II is a vision and idea that had been crafted and thought out over Barns-Graham’s entire career: an attempt to capture nature’s excitement and simplicity.
Caring for the Collection is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund Scotland.
Thanks to National Lottery players, we will be able to dedicate time to improve the condition of our artworks currently in our store, so that they will be able to be displayed in health and social care settings across Scotland.
Museum & Galleries Technician Modern Apprenticeship is supported by Museums Galleries Scotland provider of the apprenticeship, mentor and SCQF level 7
2 July 2026 by
Amy Miles