Commission for the new Meadow Unit, a Psychiatric intensive care unit for young people at the Warneford Hospital, Oxford.
Screen printing in progress on panels for the Warneford hospital
Responding to ideas from young people in the Highfield and Project lead, Tom Cox, the artists developing work for the PICU unanimously agreed that the meadow should be a starting point. This gave me an opportunity to build on past works based around trees and woodland (from the residency ‘Talking Trees’ with University of Reading, 2018) and to consider ideas about social networks in relation to recent scientific discoveries relating to invisible underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and how they enable trees to connect and share resources. As a metaphor, this opens up ways of thinking about the hospital itself, the complexity of this system of care and the more nuanced and less visible aspects which can be overlooked. Many intersecting webs and networks collaborate to hold each other in the woodlands, providing mutual benefits. Whilst we can over idealise this image, it gives a sense of how we can think about the shared enterprise of caring.
Drawings were engraved into plywood panels using a router so that they can be experienced by touch to create a haptic sensory experience. These were overlaid with silkscreen prints, using imagery generated through workshops with service users and through my own research and development processes.
