C100 review: Integrated Artworks at RVH

Belfast: The Integrated Artworks Project at the Royal Victoria Hospital

 The Integrated Art Works installed in the new buildings of the Royal Victoria Hospital call up Padraic Fiacc's comment on his poems in Semper Vacare ('Make Space'):

I visited my cousin's son in the Royal Victoria Hospital, after he was injured by a bomb in Armagh...looking at his injuries and bringing him toys, 'Making him unwrap the paper bags himself/To gauge the amount of brain damage'. It's a book about toys in the hospital, about the fact that even though suicide is deeply attractive we must go on to bring toys to the hospital because there is no alternative.

In the hospital's Remembrance Garden a quotation from Seamus Heaney, recalling the irrevocable alterations of inner and outer space made by death, is carved in a stone circle around a young sapling: 'I thought of walking round and round a space, Utterly empty, utterly a source'. Are these recent artworks then, co-ordinated by Philip Napier and installed in the hospital's new building, 'utterly empty, utterly a source'? Do they (re)make space or act as challenge or salve for suffering and loss?

Certainly Alice Maher's 'Fairy Tale Wall' in the Special Investigations Unit re-makes space while unwrapping new diagnostic 'toys' in the hospital. The small bronze sculptures from fairy-tales, sited in wall niches, are meticulously executed. Paradox is condensed: this sculpture knows that healing and hopelessness, intentional and collateral damage, porridge bowls (The Three Bears) and shoes that no longer fit (Cinderella) co-exist in both hospitals and fairy-tales. Humpty Dumpty is concentrated synecdoche - an egg in an alcove; headless but leg-full, gravid but fragile: maternity is a hairsbreadth from accident and emergency. Maher's work has the wry economy of 'two thinks at one time' where, as Sam Beckett put it, "a labouring woman straddles the grave."

Of the eleven artists' work installed, so far, in the new buildings it is Janet Mullarney's which excites me most. Her figurative, wooden, partially pigmented, sculptures are immediately accessible - hacked and hewn with a kind of empathetically precise surgery - and spiritually withdrawn. It's sculpture, instinctively sure around pain, which refuses Job's comforters. A horizontal figure in broad-brush red pyjamas, less than life-size, hand tucked under a wooden face, is suspended in an alcove beside a little boat with two tiny chairs. Tactile and taciturn, floating yet earthed, the sculpture closes and opens the space between serenity and pain, between physician and patient, between sleep and death. Sculpture of deceptive simplicity, but driven by a necessary sanctity, it becomes essential in the fullest sense of that word. Kahil Gibran's paradoxical feeling that awareness is just an 'awakening into a deeper dream' comes to mind.

Philip Napier's work in the hospital restaurant finds silver plated spoonfuls of medicine swimming in shoals across curved walls. The work is more kinetically excited and clinically colder on the surface than Mullarney's wooden surgery, but its meticulous measured by a deft humour that's somewhere between Lily the Pink, a spoonful of sugar and Prufrock. A shallow circular recess in the restaurant's roof houses Napier's red, neon, prescription above diners: 'SHAKE A BOTTLE one spoonful to be taken three times a day after every meal.' In corridors Michael Minnis's large photographic laser prints (depicting leaves, thermometers and hand or finger prints) are applied to glass windows; they bring a composite X-Ray of art and city into the interior. In the reception area, near Michael Warren's warm, curved, well-finished and jointed wooden screen in oak, Maud Cotter's work is ready for assembly. Upstairs in the fracture clinic Paul Gregg's models of Belfast's bomb-damaged or repaired buildings (from the Europa to the Albert Clock) are appositely held by together by 'fixator' which is used in fracture repair. This assembly of three-dimensional art works, then, is eclectic, kinetic, exciting. Integration in the hospital context has generally, rightly, prescribed empathy and not a cure for artistic independence. Having worked in the bowels of Victorian hospitals with bare bulbs in a mortuary, untouched grapes by the bedside or testimonies to the great and good inscribed in hallways in gilt, I found few these new art-works neither so utterly sterile nor comfortlessly empty, that they refused to become a re-source. And in Janet Mullarney's sculpture, there's something else, akin to Heaney's cure and source.

John Brown is a writer and poet based in Belfast.

The Integrated Artworks Project, Royal Victoria Hospital, ongoing

Janet Mullarney: life-size figure in polychromed wood and wool; courtesy Christopher Hill