Curating Kindness: Can Kindness be an Art Practice?

If you've been a subscriber to my mailing list, you'll be aware that the past 18 months have been a difficult time for me. I've been writing this post, on and off, for the past year and haven't ever found the right words to really flesh it out in a way that feels quite right. Please excuse it if it feels a little clunky and disjointed.

In the absence of coherence, I've been letting my hands and my intuition lead me to new answers through the process of making and sketching. And through that process I've been thinking about the ways in which we pull people close through acts of kindness and push people away through slights of anger and dismissiveness. It's informing a new body of work, but it's slow in the making and I'm not yet at a point where anything feels resolved.

In the meantime, here's a post about the ways I've built kindness into my practice in past projects and how it informs the way I build my business. I hope that, if nothing else, perhaps it might extend the ways in which we think about and interact with gestures of kindness, and whether we might be able to extend a little extra kindness for 2026.

The Contradictions of Kindness

Intuitively, we should always be able to be kind. But have you ever found yourself unable to extend that little bit of kindness to someone in need? Personally, I find myself kinder, more generous and more empathetic at the times when I feel most secure, confident and happy. At the times when I'm emotionally or energetically depleted, I have to make a more concerted effort.

I listened with interest to Dr Gabor Maté's 'When the Body Says No', whose research suggests that 'nice' people suffer worse health outcomes than others. Gabor identifies a certain category of people who are suffering with disproportionately poor health outcomes - care-givers, people-pleasers and people who are not able to maintain healthy boundaries. There's an implicit suggestion here that kindness can come at a personal cost; that these people carry the weight of other people's wants and needs to the detriment of their own needs, and it's making them sick.

And, speaking as someone who fits snuggly into all of these categories, sometimes the burden of 'being good' or 'being kind' feels heavy. Is being nice actually killing us?

There's another piece of research - a little more hopeful - that suggests that kindness is contagious; that one act of kindness can cause ripples of good deeds throughout a community (Bartlett and DeSteno, Gratitude and Prosocial Behaviour). Not only that, but people demonstrating and observing acts of kindness have the health benefits of increased levels of oxytocin and decreased levels of cortisol.

Whilst these two pieces of research might appear to be at odds with one another, there is a distinction warrents mentioning. Bartlett and DeSteno's research characterises a relational benefit - to the beneficiary, to the giver, to witnesses and to a wider community. In contrast, Gabor describes people who find themselves perpetually in the position of giving without the reciprocal act of receiving. The personal cost of caring is negated by the benefits of being cared for.

Put simply, kindness may well kill us if it's left to the few; but perhaps it can save us if it's visible and shared across the many.

Barriers to Kindness

So if you agree that, on a day when we're feeling secure and content, we can and should be publicly kind or generous, why does it sometimes still feel hard?

For me - an ardent introvert - the impulse to give is sometimes impaired by self-consciousness and self-doubt. I’ve found myself in situations where I can’t give enough, where I’ve come away feeling slightly exploited, or where just the social exchange of giving feels awkward and apologetic. And, if I’m totally honest, I think on some level I’ve internalised cynical narratives that people are greedy, that they’ll take advantage of you, and that generosity is akin to naïvety.

And there's a problem with this pervasive little narrative; if we believe that no-one else will act with the same generosity, or that our generosity is misplaced, then our kindness will not only come at personal cost, but will also be ineffectual.

But narratives are just stories. We can choose whether we believe them or not.

Kindness as an Artistic Practice

Art is uniquely placed to reflect reality back to us, and to offer us alternative ways of seeing and interacting with the world. It's a safe place to explore other perspectives, to try new things, to look at something anew. And in this way, it has the power to challenge dominant narratives and create new stories.

So what if the story that we chose to tell was not that people are inherently selfish and out for themselves? What if the story we told was that people had the capacity for kindness towards people they'd never even met? What would those stories look like and how would they manifest?

In 2020 all our assumptions and dominant narratives were upturned by the COVID-19 outbreak. People obeyed painful curfews at huge personal cost. They showed huge amounts of generosity and concern for their neighbours.

In response to those times and sentiments I developed a public art sculpture, Something Good; a monument to the goodness of people. It was designed to remove some of the barriers that might otherwise exist within the exchange of giving and taking. The sculpture was publicly mounted as a place to donate and receive gifts anonymously, without judgement, prejudice or self-consciousness. And though it is anonymous, it is also very public. People can see the exchange of gifts. And they can know that they are in a community where, no, not everyone is out for themselves.

Something Good

And whenever I’m near, I’ll always visit my little sculpture. I make a conscious choice to place something on the hands, whether I feel generous or not, because I think a story about people taking care of each other is a better story than one of people failing to care.

You can take part in Something Good in Aldgate - and if you’d like to see Something Good in your own community, get in touch. All you need is a publicly accessible wall :)

Thank you to everyone who has - and who continues to - take part in Something Good. X

Routes into Kindness

Earlier this year, I was privileged to be invited to develop an artwork to coincide with the Baton of Hope celebrations in Baskingstoke. The Baton of Hope is a touring suicide prevention initiative, aimed to provide hope, support and awareness to people suffering with their mental health and their friends and families.

I worked with the wonderful staff and students at Inclusion Education for the first part of this project, where we workshopped ideas of hope and fear. I was interested in the ways in which our fears shape and form the foundations for our hopes; that they're not wholly in opposition, but rather reflective and relational to one another. In the first workshop we used text, colour and mark-making to explore the visceral feeling of fear. The students approached the work with such sensitivity and introspection, it was truly heart-warming to help them give shape to some of the things that can be difficult to encapsulate in words. We then used these 'fear' works to form the bases of our 'hope' works; tearing, blending and reforming the works into new pieces of paper where they could draw and gild some of their ideas about hope.

The students' works formed part of an installation which was created for the public Baton of Hope celebrations. For this installation, I created a monochrome landscape of flowers and grasses, and allowed visitors to add coloured flowers to symbolise and memorialise their own hopes for their loved ones.

This artwork felt like a gentle embrace, and whilst it's not explicitly about kindness, it was about holding space for people at their most vulnerable, of giving opportunities to remember and memorialise, and to take agency over the ways we engage with our surroundings.

I lost a friend to suicide in 2020. I still find it hard to process and to engage with his memory. I think sometimes these quiet gestures can feel like the greatest kindnesses.

Building Kindness into Studio Practice

In 2022 I started thinking beyond the individual project and started to wonder how I could operate my studio in ways that were kinder and more sustainable to the wider social and environmental ecology. I've made commitments to reduce waste, increase equity and to donate a proportion of my income to charity. You can read my sustainability statement at the bottom of my About page.

Like any business, it's not perfect. We're approaching the new year and I'm trying to think holistically about what new commitments I can make that will continue to improve our systems in 2026. I've increased the holiday allowance of my two staff so that they feel less pressure during the school holidays. I'm considering what projects can run alongside my mixed media practice that will have a positive effect on people and places. And part of this year's commitment will be a kindness to myself; to allow myself space to explore and think deeply, to care for my own needs and to protect my emotional and energetic resources so that I can be my best, most kind self.

P.S.

I started writing this during a time of grief. I was shown a lot of kindness - much of which came from strangers - and it has seen me through a difficult time. It's taken me a long time to 'right' myself again, and honestly, I think I'm still a bit off-kilter. But I've been struck by the difficulty that I've had in talking about kindness whilst I have been in pain. It's a reminder to me that we should view people with generosity even when they're not in that place themselves. They might need it more than you know. Sending love.

Also - a note - I'm conscious that I use kindness, niceness and generosity somewhat interchangably here. They're not the same things. But I haven't untangled them in my mind to an extent where I can pull them apart just yet.

Wishing you a happy Christmas and the kindest of new years.