THe pillar - Peninsula University Hospital
Cone 10 reduction fired stoneware, site specific glaze, bronze, concrete & steel. H4.5 x W0.65 x D0.65 meters. 2024-25.
Commissioned as part of The Frankston Hospital Redevelopment Project, now known as Peninsula University Hospital.
Commissioners: Exemplar Health, in partnership with the Victorian Health Building Authority and Bayside Health
Assisting Artists: Aaron Barton, Claire Ellis, Audrey Liew, Angelo Ooi, Emma Ismawi, William Van de Velde & 326 community participants
Photography: Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore.
The Pillar stands in honour of its place on Boonwurrung / Bunurong land and the people both in service and served by the Peninsula University Hospital. The tiled ceramic surface is produced entirely by hand in Naarm/Melbourne, where each piece at every stage of making has been nurtured and characterised by human touch. This makes each ceramic piece, as it is with the preciousness of every human life, meaningfully unique.
Their individual dimensions reference a hospital bed, each one curved to create a type of cradle. Collectively they find fortitude and indicate toward the many people being simultaneously cared for inside the new hospital. Many of the tiles feature a subtle texture created by handmade press moulds, directly transferring the bark surface of River Red Gum and Swamp Manna Gum trees, which grew in abundance for millennia on site as part of the Carrum and Koo Wee Rup Wetlands.
The other tiles feature the unique markings of over 300 people including Hospital patients, their families, Hospital workers at all levels, and surrounding community. Participants were part of an open clay workshop, allowing them to leave gestural marks, patterns, words and drawings in clay, with each design then painstakingly made into moulds and transferred onto the surface of this work. Collectivising ownership and memorialising these markings with ceramics is in testament to the people that make this critical facility run as well as those it aids.
Photography: Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore.
The gradients of colour on the final tiles is the result of reduction firing a custom, site-specific glaze recipe with certain tones and depths being the result of local Frankston clay and ochre found in the excavated ground from building the hospital. The grout that frames each tile also contains calcined Frankston beach sand, seen under certain light as speckled tones of pink and white.
As a way-finder for the front entrance of the hospital, the angled peak of the work features a hand-sculped solid bronze top plate, with its undulating surface referencing a topographical view of Frankston’s coast-line. The Pillar’s orientation is designed for this top plate to catch and glow with morning sunlight while forever pointing West, referencing the day in, day out functioning and criticality of Frankston Hospital.
In form, materiality, colour and texture, The Pillar connects importantly and deeply to the people that will see it most and the place it calls home. The work conceptually echoes and literally contains its immediate environment as a means to anchor its position and harmonize with its surroundings, handmade by many yet standing as one.
Project Curator: Victoria Jones of T-Projects
Project Manager: Grace Dlabik of BE. ONE CREATIVE
Assisting Artists: Aaron Barton, Claire Ellis, Audrey Liew, Angelo Ooi, Emma Ismawi, William Van de Velde & 326 community participants
Producer: Grace Dlabik of BE. ONE CREATIVE
Assistant Producer: Laura Trenerry
Video:
Director: Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore
Cinematographer: Michael Hales
Additional Camera Dara Mannis
Editor: Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore
Colourist: Daniel Witt
Boom Operator: Conner O'Reilly
Sound Mix: Matthew Cunliffe
Special thanks: Fundere Fine Art Foundry, Landscape Plus, NDYLIGHT, LiTEsource & controls.