Springfield Hospital, Shaftsbury seclusion rooms
In the Spring of 2023 I ran three workshops with participants from Springfield University Hospital and The Courtauld Gallery, using lino printing techniques to explore questions around identity, the passing of time and expressions of freedom.
This was my second commission for Hospital Rooms and Arts and Mental Health Charity that brings world class art and creative programming to Mental Health Hospitals.
In the workshops the participants referenced the loss of sense of time as being one of the most challenging features of being in a seclusion room. A room that has one purpose. Containment.
Addressing this, I created four graphic murals which attempted to suggest a metaphysical open landscape with a horizon line beyond the seclusion rooms’ internal windows to offer hope and possibilities outside the confinements of its walls. A sense of outside-inside, a connection between the outdoors and the indoors, where there physically is none.
This design further continued my work around Horizons and the outdoor/indoor that started at Titian Ward in 2021 and would eventually end in another project in 2023, designed for at a teaching Hospital in Lagos.
There are four portals in the project each with a harmonious and balanced vibrant colour palette that denotes different times of day from dawn to dusk. Each room has a flora themed name, Hibiscus, Mango, Bamboo and Monstera.
A colourful semi-transparent vinyl bird was placed on the room’s skylights and were designed to function like sundials, projecting their coloured shadows across the floor as the Sun changed angles in the sky, thereby enabling a sense of passing time in an otherwise featureless space.
Photos Courtesy: Damian Griffiths/ Hospital Rooms