Hospital Rooms - MESKLA | Rag Porth/For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow)
My work for Cove Ward at Longreach House, Redruth, as part of Hospital Rooms Cornwall Project, is directly informed by the MESKLA workshops that took place last summer with Fletcher Ward at Bodmin Community Hospital and IntoBodmin, and in connection with Flamm.
During these sessions, we made rocks using recycled paper and cardboard and painted 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 we looked for the Kernewek/Cornish translation. If none existed, we created our own.
Photos © Hospital Rooms (Oliver Udy)
I've brought all of the conversations from those workshops into the making of this work. The energy, movement, imagination and experiences shared by participants; the favourites of the colours - deep blues and greens, warm yellows, pinks, reds and purples; and the shapes of the rocks we made are reflected in cut-out panels, some of which are gilded in copper leaf to remind us of the minerals beneath our soil.
It has been a fascinating process to work with the Hospital Rooms team and both Cove and Fletcher wards. To consider the importance and sensitivity of the hospital setting, and all those who live and work on the wards. I hope the installation will bring some of the wonder and joy of art making, and of our land and sea to Cove.
A book of the Hospital Rooms’ Cornwall Project will be available to purchase from the Exchange Gallery bookshop alongside an exhibition of all the commissions which runs until 28th September 2024. Please find excerpts from the book 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 © Hospital Rooms (Oliver Udy)
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