Art for Health: RSA200 Exhibition Arrives at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh
This spring, Tonic Arts is hosting RSA200 Art for Health at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh – part of a Scotland-wide touring programme celebrating the Royal Scottish Academy’s 200th anniversary.
For Tonic Arts, exhibitions in hospitals are an everyday part of our work – bringing carefully selected contemporary art into clinical spaces to support patients, staff and visitors. What makes RSA200 Art for Health distinctive is its national scale, connecting arts in health programmes across Scotland to share work, ideas and collections in ways not previously seen. The exhibition brings together work by RSA Academicians, New Contemporaries and award-winning artists, drawn from hospital art collections across the country. Curated around four themes – identity, place, nature and colour – it highlights how visual art can support wellbeing while enriching healthcare environments.
As Tonic Arts Hospital Exhibition Manager Hans Clausen explains:
“We want to take people away from the medicalised world and take them somewhere else.”
The connection to the RSA is also a particularly special one for the NHS Lothian Charity, as the organisation has also been managing the Tonic Art Collection for ten years; a collaboration which has brought specialist collection management to NHS Lothian and bringing a quality artwork on request service to healthcare sites across Edinburgh and the Lothians.
Continuing a long tradition of art in healthcare
At the Royal Infirmary, hundreds of people pass through the Tonic Arts exhibition space every day. For many, these moments where they encounter a painting on the way to an appointment or pausing in front of a photograph, offer brief but important shifts away from the pressures of a clinical setting.
This is central to Tonic Arts’ work across NHS Lothian: embedding art into everyday healthcare environments so that it becomes part of how people experience them. Rather than being separate from care, it sits alongside it, offering distraction, comfort and moments of reflection.
Bringing something unexpected into hospital spaces
RSA200 Art for Health also challenges expectations of what belongs in a hospital. Instead of focusing on illness or treatment, the exhibition introduces colour, imagination and a wider sense of the world beyond the hospital walls.
Installed within a busy working hospital rather than a traditional gallery, the exhibition offers what Tonic Arts Collection Manager Amy Trantum describes as “a little escape hatch… like going through the wardrobe into Narnia.”
This sense of contrast is deliberate. Hospital environments are often defined by function – long corridors, neutral tones and clinical equipment. Through exhibitions like this, Tonic Arts works to introduce warmth, colour and visual interest in ways that are appropriate to the setting and supportive of how people feel within it.
As Hans notes: “Hospitals are not known for bright colours… we wanted to break that.”
Shaping environments through careful curation
The artworks selected for RSA200 Art for Health reflect Scotland’s landscapes, communities and built environment, while also introducing a more vibrant visual language.
This approach mirrors how Tonic Arts curates its wider art collection – ensuring that works are not only high-quality and contemporary, but also suited to healthcare settings. From calming imagery in waiting areas to more energising pieces in corridors, each work is chosen with its environment and audience in mind.
This commitment to quality is intentional. Tonic Arts believes the quality of the art people encounter in healthcare settings should reflect the quality of care being delivered within them.
The exhibition also connects with broader approaches to wellbeing, including NHS Lothian Charity’s Green Health work, with several pieces drawing on nature and the outdoors to bring a sense of openness into interior spaces.
Everyday impact
The impact of exhibitions like RSA200 Art for Health is often seen in small, everyday interactions:
- a patient pausing before an appointment
- a member of staff using an artwork to reassure someone during treatment
- a corridor becoming easier to navigate because a piece becomes a familiar landmark
During installation at another NHS site, Hans observed a patient awaiting a scan repeatedly returning to view the artworks, using the space to manage anxiety. Moments like this reflect how art can support people in very practical ways within healthcare settings.
Staff benefit too. Through Tonic Arts’ art-on-request service, teams can help shape their environments by selecting works suited to specific spaces, from counselling rooms to busy wards. Art can act as a focal point during procedures, a navigation aid, or even part of a patient’s recovery journey.
A shared national project
RSA200 Art for Health is part of a Scottish Healthcare Collective touring exhibition, developed in partnership with arts organisations across the country, including Artlink Central, Art in Healthcare, OutPost Arts, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust and Tayside Healthcare Arts Trust.
Following its time in Edinburgh, the exhibition will travel to hospital sites in Stirling, Larbert, Dundee, Glasgow, Dumfries and Aberdeen, bringing contemporary Scottish art into healthcare environments across Scotland.
This collaborative approach not only broadens access to art, but also strengthens connections between arts and health programmes nationwide, supporting shared learning and future partnership working.
Creativity at the heart of care
Marking both the RSA’s bicentenary and ten years of partnership with Tonic Arts, the exhibition highlights the ongoing role artists play in shaping healthcare environments today.
At its core, RSA200 Art for Health reflects something central to Tonic Arts’ work: that creativity is not an added extra, but an integral part of care, helping to shape spaces that support wellbeing, offer reassurance and create moments of connection within everyday healthcare experiences. By bringing high-quality contemporary art into hospitals, Tonic Arts also reinforces a simple principle: the environments where care happens should reflect the quality, dignity and compassion of the care itself.
Visit the exhibition
Art for Health – Scottish Art Health Collective
Tonic Arts Gallery, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh
1 April – 24 June 2026
Find out more
- Touring exhibition: Art for Health – Scottish Healthcare Collective | Royal Scottish Academy
- Our Tonic Arts Collection: NHS Lothian Charity – Tonic Collection | Art UK
