City of London Sinfonia at St John's Hospice

Led by CLS Project Artist Caroline Welsh and St John's Hospice Arts Facilitator Helen Visscher

In a series of ongoing workshops at St John's Hospice, people come together to contribute to a shared artwork, each adding their own marks, colours, and gestures to a collective page. As they create, musicians from the CLS community watch closely and translate what they see into bespoke improvisations, drawing sound, rhythm, and melody from shape, texture, colour, and movement.

Each session is different — a new group of musicians, a new collective artwork — but the impulse at the heart of it remains the same: to listen, respond, and make something together that no one person could have made alone.

For people at the hospice, the experience of being truly heard and responded to can offer something difficult to name but easy to feel: a sense of presence, agency, and belonging. In a setting where so much may feel out of reach, the act of making something together is both grounding and expansive.

Critical Hope in practice

Clear-eyed, active, and rooted in what is real, these workshops embody the spirit of critical hope. There is nothing passive about choosing to make your mark on a shared page — and nothing passive about our musicians' commitment to hear and respond to every gesture. Together, participants and musicians create something that didn't exist before from rich moments of connection and cross-fertilisation. Each collective artwork is a testament to the community that can be forged through creative engagement with one another.