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Under the Microscope is an arts research project conceived and led by artist Sofie Layton in partnership with GOSH Arts and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust and University College London. Over 12 months Sofie explored how children and families interpret medical information and understand disease.Working with clinicians, researchers, patients and their families to understand the issues she developed artwork in response to these conversations, and created imagery and representations of disease, as well as the experience of treatment. The project culminated in a series of installations exhibited at the hospital and the Institute of Child Health. Artworks included 3D medical heart prints, interpretive heart sculptures, soundscapes, embroidered and embossed hearts made by Sofie and participants, and a sensory installation, which explored the visual landscape and intricacies of the immune system, and the experiential reality of a young patient undergoing gene therapy. Audiences were invited to "scrub up" and enter an interactive isolation tent with an accompanying soundtrack. Patients and hospital staff were invited to attend the exhibition and discuss the issues raised. The exhibits where also open to the public on bookable tours guided by young people from our Young Persons Advisory Group. Feedback was gathered from all participants and the public were also given the opportunity to comment. There was a highly positive response from both patients and clinicians, and the general public.

This paper focuses on several images and metaphors from an artist residency at the Evelina Children’s Hospital and subsequent production at the Unicorn Theatre, For the Best. The intention is to consider how reflecting on an arts-based process with children on dialysis, and their school-mates can provide new ways of viewing performance outcomes. The narrative about a family’s struggle to manage with a young boy’s long term chronic illness under the shadow of death is both strange and familiar. The paper, authored by the project’s producer and a close collaborator on the project provides insight into Mark Storor’s delicate processes as a means of understanding the ways participation, partnerships, and learning through the project may be seen as examples of the ‘Uncanny’.