RAG PORTH/FOR COVE - HOSPITAL ROOMS
Rag Porth/For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow), 2024
Hospital Rooms Cornwall Project: Cove Ward, Longreach House, Redruth
Mixed-media mural, cut-out plywood panels, paint, copper leaf
My work for Cove Ward is directly informed by the MESKLA workshops that took place with Fletcher Ward at Bodmin Community Hospital and IntoBodmin, in connection with Flamm.
During these sessions, we made rocks using recycled paper and cardboard, painting them in colours that reflected our identities and how we feel about Kernow/Cornwall and its rocks, moors and coast. We thought about names for the colours we had chosen, and looked for the Kernewek/Cornish translation. If no suitable translation existed, we created our own.
I have brought the conversations, energy, movement, and imagination shared by the workshop participants into the making of this installation. The shapes of the workshop rocks and the groups favourites colours - deep blues, greens, warm yellows, pinks, reds and purples - are reflected in cut-out panels. Some of these are gilded in copper leaf to remind us of the minerals beneath our soil.
It has been an impactful process to consider the importance and sensitivity of the hospital setting, working closely with the Hospital Rooms team and both Cove and Fletcher wards. I hope this installation brings some of the wonder and joy of art making, and of our land and sea, to everyone who lives and works on Cove Ward.
Exhibitions & Publication
A book documenting the Hospital Rooms’ Cornwall Project was published alonside an exhibition of all the commissions at The Exchange Gallery, see excerpts below.
‘Emotions may involuntarily experience a lift as colour and composition overwhelm the confinement of the architecture, releasing a range of associations – not least with the precious materials indigenous to the local landscape that has been worked by Cornish families for centuries. Almost in the Baroque fashion that animates seventeenth-century interiors around Europe, the restraining walls seem to dissolve into the visual interplay of perceptions – terrestrial, aquatic or celestial.’
- Martin Holman on MESKLA | Rag Porth/For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow) in his essay about the Hospital Rooms Cornwall Project.
‘MESKLA | Rag Porth / For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow) is a mixed media mural that travels along a windowless corridor on Cove Ward. Its organic forms in deep blues, greens and yellows take the eye on a journey through cascading drifts of colour, while ‘rocks’ rendered in plywood and coated with shimmering copper and magenta act like jewels and provide a tactile surface for passers-by to interact with. For some, it reminds them of the aquamarine waters along the coast of Cornwall; for others, a glorious summer sky. The colours and forms are closely linked to creations made during workshops that Sovay ran with patients and members of the public with lived experience of mental health services.‘
- Anna Testar, Senior Curator, Hospital Rooms.
Photos ©Oliver Udy courtesy of Hospital Rooms
