Projects

This project asks participants to reflect on the kinds of waiting that shape experiences of care, including waiting for a diagnosis, a call, a recovery or a moment of calm. Waiting can be tiring, but it can also change how we pay attention and how we respond.

The project began with sketches made in a hospital corridor by a Care Lab Collective member who documented the quiet movements of people waiting: shifting chairs, hands folded, reading, noticing others, offering sympathetic smiles...and individuals sitting alone or with others. Returning to those drawings later suggested that waiting can function as a demanding but essential act of care, a way of holding space for others and for time to unfold.
 

Participants are invited to share drawings, short writing or comics that reflect on moments of waiting in clinical, personal or everyday settings. By looking closely at what waiting feels like and how it shapes our interactions, we may notice forms of care that are easy to overlook.

This project considers the question of “work” in care work. Do you provide care as a professional, or have you found yourself caregiving as a child, parent, friend, partner, or in some other capacity? There are so many ways to provide care, and providing that care or receiving it can be sources of enjoyment and fulfillment. Both sides of that care equation can also be messy, complicated, conflicted, and include uncomfortable or unpleasant feelings.

 

The fact is, care work is work, and this project makes room for the recognition of labor in care. This project also uses creative means to ask about how care work is (or is not) valued, compensated, recognized, and reciprocated, and what it would look like to appropriately value and support this essential, fundamentally human work. Care Lab is a creative and educational collective. Nothing on this site constitutes professional medical, mental health, or therapeutic advice.

What are your experiences of being or becoming a caregiver to children who you didn’t birth? You might be a step-parent, an adoptive or surrogate parent, a grandparent, a father, the non-birth partner in a queer relationship. So many narratives about parenting are based on stereotypical, limited notions of mothers and fathers that make many assumptions about family structures, responsibilities, and affinities. How have you come to understand your role in the family? What challenges have you encountered that you didn’t expect? What models do you relate to for caregiving?

 

Example: To Not Be a Mother

The Grief Project is an open-ended exploration of how creative practices can help us notice and reflect on experiences of loss. It began with a drawing one of the Care Lab Collective made of her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister holding hands the day before her grandmother died—a drawing she happened to be making in the hospital cafeteria at the very moment her grandmother passed. Returning to that image a year later and redrawing it in a new style revealed unnoticed details—a patterned cardigan, a cane, a glance, the vital signs on a monitor—that reshaped the memory and opened space for reflection.

Building on that experience, this project invites participants to share their own creative responses to grief through drawings, comics, stories, or other forms. By revisiting moments of loss and noticing what may have been hidden or overlooked, we might honor the complexity of grief and discover new ways of carrying memory forward.

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