Futurecity delivered Royal Papworth Hospital’s approved Arts Strategy, completing 4 large-scale permanently embedded art commissions within the new hospital. The artworks help create a healing environment, supporting the positive wellbeing of staff, patients and visitors.
In addition, a 1-year artist-in-residence worked with patients and staff at the old hospital during the last year of operation. Senior clinical, construction, cultural and patient representatives advised and supported the artist selection and commissioning through to completion.
Entrances – Adam Ball
The two ground floor hospital entrances are enhanced by Adam Ball’s digitally lit glass facades. Adam worked with staff across hospital departments to produce large scale hand cut representations of microscopic imagery, digitally embed these within 20 4metre x 2metre glass panels and lit them with a programmable LED system that changes with the 24hr clock and annual seasons.
Outpatients Waiting Room – Sigune Hamann
A single floor to ceiling panoramic landscape photograph taken from the original Papworth site in the Cambridgeshire countryside. The artwork envelopes the room in a green and blue natural landscape, and allows the viewer to reveal details from this much-loved environment where the hospital previously called home for 101 years.
Critical Care Unit – Sigune Hamann
Circular lightbox artworks in two private interview rooms where visitors discuss sensitive patient details with staff, and in the staff rest room, where staff relax from work. The illuminated embedded artworks of clouds and sky enable staff and visitors to connect to the outside world.
192 Inpatient bedrooms – Stefanie Posavec
192 individual artworks, each embedded on the rooms full-length glass wall/door. Stefanie collected patient volunteer Echocardiogram (Blood and Vessels), Spirograph (Breadth and Lungs), and Pulse data (Beats and Pulse), and transformed it into visual artworks of Flows, Branches and Waves to enhance the room environment. They create detailed visual interest and privacy for the patient, and support individual room identity for staff.
Orientation & Identity – Thomas Matthews
A site wide signage system for staff and visitors to move around the hospital environment. The hospital’s 5 floors are categorised on the earths elements and rhythms, informing a colour palette and pattern system.
Artist-in-Residence – Lucy Steggals (partnership with Wysing Arts)
Lucy created a project entitled ‘Florulary’. It explored the historical and contemporary relationship between the hospital and the floral. Through archival research, she revealed Papworth’s rich floral legacy throughout the 20th century. The project created playful ways to reintroduce flowers into the hospital environment as organic flowers are no longer allowed on wards. She worked with the Papworth community to record and celebrate the non-clinical aspects of care. The outcomes included a series of portraiture photo shoots with Papworth staff, patients and visitors, and work with ten patients on the Cystic Fibrosis ward to create projections, tattoos, clothing and puzzles, resulting in printing bespoke floral bedding which the patients co-designed for their own use. A final publication captures the ideas and imagination of the Cystic Fibrosis patients, their floral designs and photographs of the staff and from the Papworth archive. It was gifted to each ward and each bed in the new hospital.
Read more about it at Royal Papworth Charity
Royal Papworth Hospital photo © Royal Papworth
