Care to Listen is a project created by dance artists Kirsty Arnold and Tora Hed, developed from their shared experience of living alongside residents in a care home in Harehills, Leeds.
Both artists moved into the care home, immersing themselves in daily life and delivering regular movement sessions. They invited fellow artists Sally Storr, Alice Marcelino and Luke Wilson to join them in a series of creative activities and spontaneous happenings shaped by the rhythms of the home.
The project sits within a participatory and socially engaged arts practice, viewing the care home not as a place defined by limitation, but as a living environment shaped by relationships, memory and embodied experience. By living and working within the care home, the artists blurred traditional boundaries between artist, participant and audience. Movement, photography and shared creative moments became ways of working together, allowing residents to shape how their stories, bodies and identities were expressed. In doing so, Care to Listen contributes to wider discourses on ageing, care and participatory practice, proposing attentiveness, reciprocity and shared authorship as foundational to creative work in care contexts.
Tora Hed and Kirsty Arnold
