From brightening up a corridor to creating aesthetic responses to the environment, art in hospital has become a major part of the healing process, writes Gemma Tipton
Can art make you feel better? Aid in recovery? Or does a bit of well-placed art just help to assuage that institutional feel from which even the best-designed hospital can suffer?
Waterford Regional Hospital was one of the first hospitals in Ireland to use contemporary art in order, as they put it, "to enhance the healing environment", subsequently setting up the Waterford Healing Arts Trust (What) in the 1990s.
The art collection established by What is made up of donations, purchases, and work created through an artist-in-residency programme. A selection from the collection, entitled Doing the Rounds, has just begun a tour of hospitals throughout the State.
Art in hospitals has moved on from the time in which it was primarily sited for reasons of prestige. The creative skills of artists are now called upon to intervene in the design of hospitals, and art works are made as aesthetic, creative or even critical responses to the hospital environment. This process goes beyond the artist simply creating a work to make a foyer or corridor look better. Instead, in the words of artist Philip Napier, who worked with the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, it can take on the responsibility of finding "new ways of communicating . . . [ and] testing out how things might be actually made to matter".
Scientific study has followed, although not always matched, artistic research into the healing or therapeutic values of art in hospitals. Robert Ulrich's 1984 study, V iew Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery, which was published in Science, and MJ Friedrich's The Arts of Healing (Journal of the American Medical Association,1999) both promoted art or, more specifically, representational views of nature, as an aid to recovery, particularly for their effects on stress and anxiety levels.
For many of our leading contemporary artists, however, representational views of nature are not particularly satisfying subjects for study. Work done by the Ark with the Children's Hospital in Temple Street demonstrates how art can redefine space more positively; and Open Window, an ongoing study in the haematology ward at St James's Hospital, is using scientific measures to record the effects of an art programme in the ward's transplant recovery suites.
The challenge for artists working in a hospital context and for those running art-in-hospital programmes is to make work that resonates positively with patients and visitors, and yet still has artistic value and merit in its own right.
The arts and environment manager with Mater Campus Hospital Development Ltd, Dara Carroll, describes the evidence in favour of art as an aid to recovery as "anecdotal" and agrees that the quantifiable evidence is "limited" but points to recent studies, such as one from the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, which is bringing scientific data up to a level to match the quality of art being made in these contexts.
The overwhelming nature of the hospital as an institution can engulf art projects, with the result that some works can become rather literal; one wonders, for example, how many photographs or paintings of babies one might want to look at in a maternity ward? On the other hand, thoughtful responses, such as Maria Casey's Pyjamas series (which is part of this exhibition), become even more powerful in the heightened hierarchical hospital environment. Other artists whose work appears in the exhibition include Tom Molloy, William Crozier, Graham Knuttel, Siobhán Piercy, Diana Copperwhite, Paul Mosse and Brigid Teehan.
Mary Grehan, arts co-ordinator with What, describes the process of commissioning and selecting art as a "process of dialogue" with the artists and with the different constituencies within the hospital.
Grehan is conducting her own research into how people respond differently to art in hospitals than in an art gallery. As Doing the Roundstravels around the State, a questionnaire aims to catch people's reactions to the works and further this research. Meanwhile, What is establishing a dedicated centre for arts and health, which will include a participatory arts space, an artists' studio and a library/research centre, and will be the first of its kind in Ireland.
"It will give us the opportunity to bring different people in and to test different things, and also to incubate projects and ideas," she says. While hard scientific data may still be catching up, artists and arts co-ordinators in hospitals are forging a significant body of research in action, and making our hospitals far more pleasant both for recovery and to visit.
Doing The Rounds
•September 6th-November 1st: The Mater Hospital, Dublin.
•November 15th-January 4th, 2008: St James's Hospital, Dublin.
•January 17th-March 13th, 2008: University Hospital Galway.
•March 27th-May 22nd, 2008: Waterford Regional Hospital.