St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Melbourne, Australia, is leading the way in coming up with innovative approaches to slow looking in a hospital environment. This year, they designed six “slow art cards” with photos of works from their St Vincent’s Art Collection – and on the back of each card they printed brief instructions guiding participants in looking slowly at the art featured on the front.

What a great way to bring art, and the art of slow looking, into all the corners of a hospital. We hope that many more hospitals around the world copy St. Vincent’s. Too often, the art in a hospital is not accessible to many patients. To that point, St. Vincent’s distributed the cards broadly to both staff and patients in Pain Management, Pastoral Care, Correctional Services and Palliative Care.

Below is the view of the back side of the card with the instructions:

Below are the front sides of the six cards. Note that the event organizers made sure that the art reflected the diversity of St. Vincent’s hospital community, which is why they included artists from a variety of backgrounds.

At Slow Art Day HQ we are really impressed with the creativity of the staff at St. Vincent’s Hospital. This is a great way to enhance the healing environment and support both patients and staff.

We look forward to many more hospitals around the world copying the ingenuity of the team at St. Vincent’s and can’t wait to see what they come up with for Slow Art Day 2025!

– JJ, Johanna, Ashley, and Phyl