From issue: #10 Care
Celine Marchbank’s practice focuses on capturing small details in everyday life that may go unnoticed. It is about documenting human presence by way of exploring stories of people and emotions that the traces left tell.
Town Portfolio stems as a response to emotions of hopelessness and unease experienced by the artist in the many waiting rooms in hospitals she visited whilst accompanying her terminal mother to cancer treatments. As one of the four artists commissioned for CONNECT – the 3Ts hospital redevelopment public art programme – Marchbank was invited to work with the thematic frame of ‘Brighton and Hove’. The artist comments that ‘what attracted her to the commission is that it was about making clinical spaces nicer for the people that use them’.
During her preliminary research, Marchbank attended meetings organised by the Royal Sussex County Hospital’s personnel, joined a variety of community groups attended by staff and patients alike, organised encounters with hospital users, and visited other clinical settings and hospices. Marchbank realised that what makes a space warm, kind and welcoming is the simple things such a vase of fresh flowers, a soft chair for you to sit on as opposed to the uninviting plastic chairs in hospitals waiting rooms or a cup of freshly brewed tea waiting to be drank; things we generally find at one’s home. The idea of home and exploring what makes ‘home’ became central to Marchbank’s proposal for the commission.
Working in collaboration with the different people she connected with, Marchbank set out to explore what ‘home’ meant to them. Having an expansive approach to the theme, Marchbank not only documented people’s homes but also activities and situations that, in their view, offered the warm comfort and peace that the idea we have of home should provide.
The 45 photographs that compose Town Portfolio, are Marchbank’s attempt to stimulate positive emotions in the future users of the renewed Royal Sussex County hospital by bringing some of that home’s cosiness and familiarity to ward settings.
Find out more about Celine Marchbank’s process for the 3Ts project below:
About CONNECT
Photoworks in partnership with Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Willis Newson and the University of Brighton have commissioned four new works for CONNECT – the 3Ts hospital redevelopment public art programme.
These commissions deliver a permanent collection of photographic artworks sited across 36 public waiting rooms within the new 3Ts redevelopment of Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital to open soon.
CONNECT, the public art programme for the hospital, will create a distinctive identity for the hospital and a lasting legacy of accessible, high-quality public art for the city, county and community. Underlining a sense of place connecting patients and the local environment, the four themes chosen for the photography programme of CONNECT are Sussex, South Downs, Brighton and Coast.
Text: Raquel Villar-Pérez, Photoworks
Learn more about Celine Marchbank Learn more about 3TS Read more Photography+ here