The art at Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital

Public art is required to do many things. It is often looked to as a means of humanising an unloved space: areas in need of regeneration, newly built housing estates, corporate developments – all invite artistic interventions, although some approaches work better than others. Public art is expected to have a broad, if not mass, appeal. Unlike gallery art, which can afford to be provocative or challenging, public art needs to be enjoyed and appreciated by its audience if it is to fulfil its function as a humanising force. Yet people have such particular aesthetic tastes and personal views that catering for such a broad constituency must seem a daunting task to artists. How does one deal with a whole community of people without addressing them from ‘on high’ and littering their spaces with something they do not want or understand?

Increasingly, public art commissions have avoided the figurative forms of old traditional civic statuary. As a culture we have consciously moved away from literally and figuratively elevated heroic figures on plinths representing ‘official’ histories, and towards more abstract forms that invite multiple, more personal,
interpretations. Public works by Rachel Whiteread for instance,show that a gallery practice derived from conceptualism and minimalism can be extended to public situations to great effect. Whiteread’s ambiguous monuments and outside projects
tend to galvanise productive debate (about social responsibility, collective history, etc.); while her simple inversions of domestic space evoke intimate personal experience – a common thread for all of us – and inspire delight as well as serious reflection.

Overall, today’s public art strategies favour, rather than stifle, playfulness and creativity. The best public art responds to its locality, and channels the emotional concerns of its constituency of users /viewers – it also encourages individual and imaginative interactions with one’s environment. Finding yourself in a hospital is disconcerting, whether you are a patient, family member or visitor. Despite the best efforts of staff and carers, being ill and undergoing treatment can be demoralising and dehumanising. Malfunctioning bodies refuse to be taken for granted, and distressed minds dwell on difficult thoughts. What role can art
play in these circumstances? The dread and boredom of waiting for treatment might be mitigated with engaging, even thought provoking material on the walls. It seems particularly important in the case of young patients that they are offered distractions not necessarily in the form of escapism, but rather in ways that help them to engage with what is happening to them and to others around them. This was the brief to artists involved in the RACH project. They were also asked to think beyond the usual forms of hospital art, and indeed beyond their usual practice, in order to come up with genuinely fresh propositions.

The resulting work, sited throughout the hospital by 15 different artists and designers, is lively, engaging, witty and poignant by turns. Each intervention succeeds on its own terms, but also contributes to an overarching invitation to navigate and reflect upon our personal and shared experience. Since the 1960s
artists have been interested in investigating and anatomising the ordinary, and it is appropriate to see these themes recurring here. Conceptual artists in particular took to mapping ordinary journeys, devising arbitrary classification systems, observing their bodies performing mundane tasks. Although their methods were pseudo-scientific – they habitually used grids, text, photographic evidence and so on – the intended effect was humorous and entertaining as well as thought provoking and philosophically serious. The work at RACH can be read in the
same way.

A colourful grid of squares on the reception and waiting room walls is continually added to – each square symbolises a donation made to the ARCHIE Foundation (the hospital’s fundraising charity). With every new area of wall colonised, the
constellation of connections expands further. Visitors search the grid to locate themselves and people they know, or else they gaze across all the individuals, groups and remembered relatives that constitute this particular community. The world outside the hospital is also imported in the form of Jane Watt’s light boxes,
Postcard Journeys. Recollections of the artist’s 1200–mile journey to visit staff and patients’ favourite places in the north east of Scotland are now encapsulated in pairings of text and image, and revisited in the reader’s imagination. The illuminated postcards dot the corridors like little beacons – a potentially comforting sight on one’s shorter, but markedly less carefree, journey around the hospital. In a situation when the preoccupations of a ‘normal’ life have been suspended, it is reassuring to see art that brackets and replays memories, conversations, and life experiences. Touches such as Lucy Richards’ cartoon thought bubble drawn
above a baby changing table, raise a smile and cause us to consider another’s consciousness for a moment, or reflect on our own psychological development.

Hospitals are designed according to the way medicine classifies and categorises the body’s mechanics and operations. The network of specialist departments are linked by corridors – arteries that encourage people to circulate, rather than settle.
Thus the functional environment of a hospital circumscribes the body in particular ways. The art at RACH acknowledges and mitigates this by stimulating and involving the body directly. Many works use lenticular processes that are activated by movement – a physical engagement that makes travelling around the building more fun. This conjunction between body function, hospital function and art function is especially apt in Speech Therapy, where Lucy Richards’ colourful text lenticulars alternate between SHE SELLS and SEA SHELLS; or SEVENTY
SEVEN and BENEVOLENT ELEPHANTS. In Physical Therapy, the rhythmic, sing-song instructions HOP / SKIP, PUSH / PULL and HEADS SHOULDERS / KNEES AND TOES appear in front of physiotherapy equipment. Along the corridors of Mental Health, Outpatients and elsewhere photographs of children come momentarily to life as you pass, like the enchanted portraits of Hogwarts School. Andy McGregor’s lenticular portraits of local primary school pupils switch between straight faces and pained, cheeky, or surprised expressions. In Radiography, Nick
Veasey’s beautiful x-rayed shells miraculously reveal their structure, and crammed school bags their contents.

Further text-based works appear as vinyl lettering. Throughout RACH, genuinely amazing facts about our biology adorn corners, columns, waiting rooms and loos. Although they don’t move, Lucy Richards’ Fun Facts are nevertheless optically witty, with shifts in colours and text size that create the vivid impression of a spoken emphasis. The ‘voice’ that we hear is one that appeals to adults and children alike – friendly, enthusiastic, expressive and knowledgeable. This benevolent voice uses everyday objects and familiar measurements of time and space as metaphors to explore the foreign terrain that lies inside us.
Some facts take the form of observations, cleverly sited – the one opposite appears wrapped around the corner of a bay crammed with prams.

Some are so lyrical they read like concrete poetry. This reverie is located in Surgery:

You will spend on average 20 years of your life asleep and dream for 1,000 days

Indeed, popular and personal forms of classification surface everywhere in the hospital. The deeply satisfying activity of making up your own collections and classes of things perhaps helps to mitigate the impersonality of the medical handbook and scientific classification.

Michael Brennand-Wood celebrates the joy of collecting and cataloguing in his appealing wall piece Shakin’ All Over. A twist on the (usually orderly) tradition of specimen collecting, his eight brightly coloured boxes contain hundreds of found images sorted into categories that are associated with the north east: shells, birds, maps and so on. Each tiny image stands out on a wire and the boxes are spring mounted, so they shoogle excitedly when examined closely by the curious.

Julia Griffiths-Jones is another artist whose work delights in more popular forms of classification. Her wire relief Healing Apron is festooned with herbs, flowers and symbols. The species were taken from Culpepper’s Herbal and evoke old wives’
remedies, particularly for children’s afflictions. Mistletoe for convulsions, saffron for measles, goat’s beard for liver and chest disorders – the old remedies and starched apron shape conjure up a nostalgic image of hands-on healing and brow mopping.

This aura of simple compassion reappears in Jane Watt’s Button Wall, outside the chapel, which shimmers with 58,500 pearly buttons applied by hand.

They stand for marked time, domestic tasks; maybe they memorialise the baby clothes that have been outgrown. The desire to touch the soft curved wall is as irresistible as the impulse to hold someone’s hand or stroke their face. In different
ways, the relief herbals, wall-mounted classification boxes and shimmering buttons are all poised between two and three dimensions. It is as if the artists want to reach out beyond the classical picture frame and encompass the viewer, or at least occupy the same space. This too is an artistic strategy that dates back to the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Minimal artists in particular became suspicious of pictorial illusions and acted on their desire to occupy ‘real space’ instead. They began to place groups of abstract cubes and modular constructions directly on the floor of the gallery. This blank-looking work was puzzling for most adult gallery goers who did not know how to approach it. Yet it was implicitly understood by young children, who set about exploring the collections of blocks, mirrors and tiles by means of circumnavigating, skipping along or over works, and playing peekaboo. Minimalist artists wanted us to go back to basics: to question our perceptual habits and to wonder more at our relationship with the world and its objects.

It is highly appropriate then, and in line with the aims of the partners at RACH, that much of the sculpture and furniture design here should draw on minimalist precedents. Allan Watson’s ‘family’ of Sculptured Seating consists of wooden
blocks of rounded and straight forms combined in different ways. Their distinctive shapes and etched decoration give each piece a personality, which makes it more difficult for people (regardless of age) to walk past them without trying them out. Elsewhere Matthew Hilton’s modular blue and red seats have employed the serial and permutational principles of minimalism to great practical effect – three shapes of chair give hospital staff the scope to assemble them in snakes and huddles (as well as the more conventional rows), thus varying the layout and
atmosphere of waiting rooms at will.

Meanwhile, Ally Wallace’s Space Place is strategically situated outside the hospital, signalling the way for anyone approaching the main entrance or A&E. The 75 coloured poles create a cluster, a constellation that you can wander through. The poles all stand at different heights so they become almost animated when you walk past at speed. From a distance, they look like a graphic display of sound waves. Up close, they feel like a grove of trees or giant pencils. Space Place, like its name, is endlessly suggestive. Its imaginative form and vibrant colours also serve to reassure the approaching visitor that the hospital inside is
ready and waiting to deal with children’s emotional as well as physical needs.

Consistent with the values of pop, minimal and conceptual art that still dominate the contemporary art world, all the artists at RACH have recognised the power of the (extra)ordinary to fascinate and entertain us. They have deployed it here for
compassionate ends. Crucially, all these works operate on the different levels necessary to appeal to different ages and abilities – they demand to be touched, gazed at, counted, read out loud, physically and mentally explored.

It is a considerable achievement that the RACH collection not only succeeds functionally and artistically, and contributes in invaluable ways to this impressive new hospital facility; it also now stands as an exemplary and innovative model for hospital art in the future.

Kirstie Skinner is a researcher, writer and lecturer in contemporary art