From the Dayroom
From the Dayroom
1997
Media: silkscreen print on board, glass, loudspeakers, audiotape
Size: 3550 x 2300 x 100mm,
Exhibited:
1997 – “…from the institution." (one-person exhibition), Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery.
About this work:
My one-person exhibition “from the institution…” (1997) included the installation From the Dayroom (1997), the main components of which were ‘print’ and ‘sound’ based. A false wall was built into the main infrastructure of one of the lower galleries of the City Museum and Art Gallery Stoke-on-Trent. On to this wall, was pasted hand printed wallpaper, designed with a repeated pattern consisting of four line drawings. Two were sketches for sculptural objects that would never be made, resembling clothing or aids for restraining the human body. These indeterminate drawings evoked items used in medicine for either surgical or psychiatric applications—one resembled an abdominal harness and the other a surgical gown. Two further images took the form of botanical illustrations, one of lavender (Lavandula) and one of foxglove (Digitalis). Both plants have pharmaceutical applications, however Digitalis is more widely known for its toxic properties. Each motif was screen-printed in a pale, domestic lilac colour repeated across the expanse of wall. Attached to this surface were a number of drinking glasses for ‘listening’. A grid of miniature holes allowed behind each glass allowed sound to pass through from hidden speakers. The audience could put their ear to each of the glasses and hear a repeated loop of three separate sounds: heavy rainfall, the cawing of crows and a solitary galloping horse approaching and leaving. My intention was to convey an impression of institutional isolation.
As a title, From the Dayroom has its own loaded implications. Dayrooms are places of (often enforced) leisure away from the therapeutic or medicalised parts of hospitals or sanatoriums. They present the acceptable and often visually anodyne face of environments where harsher realities are found elsewhere. In institutions like hospitals, the dayroom is a place to accept visitors, converse loudly, watch TV and smoke. Often a space for rehabilitation, it masquerades as a living room, usually containing trappings of domestic environments, not readily found in neighbouring environs such as wards, consulting and treatment rooms, labs and offices. However, such trappings are illusory. Look more closely and dayrooms will also house the institutional signifiers of the emergency call switch, waterproof furnishings, sharps bucket and bins containing bio-hazardous waste ready for incineration. The doors are often locked, and when visitors leave, the dayroom is a place of solitude. From the Dayroom was in fact, a windowless interior expanse where audiences could not see but only imagine a world outside. The one offered by the sounds coming through the drinking glasses, revealed something both harsh and comforting in its implied remoteness. The various pictorial, sonic and experiential elements that made up this work acted as signifiers which, read in conjunction with one another, made up a hybrid space, offering senses of both comfort and danger, healing and fear.
