Bernadette Madden, Vicki Crowley, John Behan and photographer Joe O'Shaughnessy are among 100 artists who have donated work to a new support centre for cancer patients at University College Hospital, Galway.
The Inis Aoibhinn art collection is the first of its type for a patient support centre in Europe, according to Cancer Care West, which opened the €4.2 million building last March.
The centre provides accommodation for patients receiving radiotherapy treatment at the Galway hospital, along with aftercare, counselling and complementary therapies.
The response from artists was overwhelmingly positive when they were contacted by Kenny Gallery in Galway about the project, according to Conor Kenny, of the gallery. "We wrote a letter to about 100 artists . . . and it happened instantly," he said.
More than 60 contributions were framed at a discount rate by Martin and John Maloney, and the "overall effect of this collection is calming and therapeutic", Mr Kenny said.
Writer and philosopher John O'Donohue paid tribute to the instigators of the project for putting together something that was "not an attendant luxury but an inner necessity" for people experiencing serious illness.
"When you are ill, you need the most refined, dextrous presence," Mr O'Donohue said.
Just as "all the rational structures" have to be left when people are diagnosed with an illness which leaves them on "new ground", so artists also try to move "outside the quotidian, daily round", he said.
"A piece of art meets you in a way that nothing else meets you," Mr O'Donohue continued, adding that art "speaks the language" that the souls of those dealing with illness had to "learn to be acquainted with".
