Odense University Hospital

Commissioned by the Danish Arts Council, 2019

The installation consists of a mix of works made by the artist especially for the department and works from the collections of Odense University Hospital and the Danish Arts Foundation.

The installation is located at the NIA unit, which is a neurology unit.

Often the hospitalized are in such poor shape that they cannot get out of bed and some are barely conscious, and I was not allowed to install art in the spaces where they were lying.
The art installation is mostly aimed at visitors and employees. A group of employees applied for funding for the art installation from the Danish Arts Council, because they found that art would help improve the atmosphere of the waiting area for visiting family and relatives.

For this reason, I felt I could not make any provocative artistic choices. This left me having to reflect on when “positive” art becomes too positive, and if there would be room for works that in some ways might mirror fear or grief.

I chose to focus on bringing as much light, colour and nature into the clinical spaces as possible. Also, I wanted to work with the idea of the “imperfect”,to mirror the hospitalized body, which I, myself, have experienced several times when hospitalized, as being dirty and messy in contrast to the clinical spaces.

The installation consists of different elements in different areas.

Firstly the hall locating the operating theatres. This is a spot that patients pass and sometimes where they wait in their beds on their way to surgery. For this space I made a series of paintings on wood in the size of a person stretched out. The colours were chosen following a survey on the view on “positive” colours amongst ex-patients. The paintings were made so that the wood was visible and as a sea of unevenness and “natural flow”. They might resemble maps or universes.

The second room was the waiting area for family and relatives.
Here I made a mobile with coloured crystals for the children’s area and a collection of fear-reducing and calming Danish flowers and herbs painted on lacquered old wooden boards. Again, this was a way of trying to bring nature into a space that must be strictly clinical and where flower pots are not allowed. These paintings also worked as “find ways”, giving each room their own board. This was to help visitors find the right door, since the doors to the patients’ rooms were often locked, and they all looked alike.

In the “common areas” I used different art pieces from the collections.

One thing I wanted to avoid was too many white walls, the other thing was dealing with the coloured walls, which I could not change, but only decorate.

I wanted to make a broad collection of works that could appeal to many different tastes of art.

Last but not least, I designed a crystal lamp for a small room that was used for communicating / passing on the often very bad news about patients to family and relatives. This small room, with no windows and no decoration was the space that especially the nurses were unhappy with and felt needed.

The lamp I designed was intended to promote a comforting atmosphere, toying with the idea of the crystals as potentially healing, and offering a more pleasant light in the corners of the room. I also chose oldlight-coloured landscape paintings from the art collection trying to make it resemble a view. Last I mounted a collection piece made of white cloth to bring more light to the dark walls of the room.