A Turn for the Better
Funded by Arts Council England, A Turn for the Better is a collaborative art project between an artist, a surgeon and patients with or recovering from oesophageal and gastric cancer, their carers and relatives.
The intention is to raise awareness of the innovative work that expert doctors perform and the difference it makes to peoples lives.
I worked with participants to explore their practical and emotional experiences to enable me to make a permanent piece of work for the hospital.
www.aturnforthebetter.org.uk is the dedicated website for the project and it displays the images and narratives from the participants. Some of the work was made before, during and after their diagnosis and treatment and some in a series of artist led workshops.
Wall Stories
The work is a collaboration between artist Anne Guest and photographer Richard Nicholls. There is also a dedicated website for their collaborative work www.guest.nicholls-uk.net
A house is an intimate space constructed of memories and experiences.
The architecture of the house plays an important role in giving our memories meaning and context. The home is where we make plans for our lives – the memories form blueprints in our minds of our experiences and the places we have lived.
Photographs of the events become the memories, and those memories construct the stories of our lives and histories. The home is often the backdrop to key moments and experiences and thus it becomes the background of the photograph. The photograph gives the memory context showing not just the ‘what’ but also the ‘where’.
A house without memories is just a space, it becomes a home when we fill that space with memories.
The Big Sleuth
X-ray Ed
Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity and Wild in Art presented The Big Sleuth (Sleuth is the collective noun for a group of bears) in the summer of 2017 as a free public art trail across the city.
The bears were auctioned in October 2017 to raise vital funds for Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity.
X-ray Ed was selected, sponsored and then bought at auction by Aston Medical School. My design acknowledges that the first x-ray ever taken for clinical use in the UK was created in Birmingham by John Hall Edwards in 1896 at the General Hospital. This building now houses the Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
Ruskin Drawing Prize 2015
Every move You Make was inspired by a controversial and frequently quoted statistic that originates from a hypothetical scenario that was used to provoke debate about CCTV in UK which states that an individual is ‘caught on camera’ 300 times a day (The Maximum Surveillance Society by Clive Norris 1999). Although this figure is unsubstantiated the UK is one of the most surveilled nations in the world. An estimated 5.9 million CCTV cameras keep watch over our every move.
The Big Hoot
The pattern on the Bone Ranger was made with a repeated pattern of mouse skeletons. It was sponsored by Birmingham University.
Presented by creative producers Wild in Art working in partnership with Birmingham Children’s Hospital, The Big Hoot brought businesses, artists, schools and the local community together to create a public art trail of stunning owl sculptures on display across Birmingham in summer 2015.
A Sign of the Times
A collaborative project with Ann Wilkinson.
A Sign of the Times is a valediction of Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital, reflecting on its origin as a workhouse in the 1870’s until it closed as a hospital in 2011.
Throughout its decommission from public service, we explored its history as a place of health and social care, and its eventual redundant position.
It an artist’s perspective of the institution. Developed from research into the archives and studies of the abandoned site, the result of this artist collaboration is a collage which considers the long held social values in healthcare in Britain with the ever advancing developments in medicine and technology.
The derelict space became a metaphor for the physical and psychological nature of the human condition.
The final piece of work comprises 100 individual images – painted (Ann Wilkinson) and photographic with drawings (Anne Guest)– that represent transient impressions, shards of memory, and random observations.
It is on permanent display at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
