Hospital Rooms commission, Perran acute psychiatric ward, Longreach House, Redruth, 2024
The Shadow of the Moon
Hospital Rooms commission, 2023-24
Arriving at Perran ward in Longreach House acute psychiatric ward in the summer of 2023, I discovered a world within a world. Behind closed security doors lay layer upon layer of stories. I visited the ward three times. Within institutional settings the art room is often seen as a safe place. During the three workshops, Hospital Rooms commissioned me to run, patients drifted in and out. Some participated in making marks in black ink on a large shared piece of paper. We were immersed in our own stories as we drew to music using feathers, sponges, plants, and cotton wool buds, creating a range of soft marks. Some sat quietly and watched, others sang. The paper became a space of shared experience.
Alone in the studio with this large-scale piece of paper containing our private story of marks, I started to cut out circles, thinking about the lives of the people I had met on the ward. I felt moved by experiencing the vulnerability of others, which in turn reflected my own shadows and vulnerabilities back at me. The circular forms I was cutting out started to take the shape of a lunar landscape as I thought about the shadowy times in our lives when we are forced to step into the unknown and to confront difficult things. The idea of an eclipse emerged from this inky black artwork generated on Perran Ward during the workshops.
When the moon passes between the sun and the earth, dark mysterious shadows emerge. The light of the sun is temporarily obscured. Birds roost, animals are confused. In this shadowy place, the moon's watery depths are revealed, a strange haunting presence of something unfamiliar and unexplained can be felt; sometimes we find ourselves walking in this Luna landscape during daylight hours. In the shadow of the moon, our mysteries, vulnerabilities, and stories are waiting to be discovered, revealed, uncovered. Each time I look into the gray tones of the shadows cast by the moon, I see something reflected back at me, a moment of uncertainty, of grief. Perhaps the moon creates a space to make meaning out of the deep poetic depths of its shadowy light?
My hope, having completed the work and seeing it installed on Perran Ward, is that the patients and staff enjoy finding their own meaning in the shadows, like lying on your back and watching the clouds, things drift by you think you recognize and then disappear back into the vastness of space. As with the drawings commissioned for Hospital Rooms Perran Ward, the shadows drift by, what you see in them today will be gone tomorrow.