Windows on the world

Taking art out of the gallery is nothing new, but putting it in hospital wards is a smart idea.  A project at St James's Hospital has been projecting art into the rooms of recuperating patients, and needs continued support, writes Gemma Tipton.

We all have the experience of lying in bed, feeling dreadful and staring fixedly at a wall or the cracks in the ceiling, too headachy and sick to want to watch the TV or read a book, instead concentrating on how ill we feel. Thankfully, for most of us, the experience is short lived. Once the cold/flu/bout of food poisoning has passed, we're able to shake off the mental malaise along with the physical, and return to the world beyond the sickbed.

For some, things aren't so simple, or so quick. Transplant patients in the haematology ward at St James's hospital (the Eugene Murray unit of the Denis Burkitt Haematology Ward, to give it its official title) can spend months in isolation rooms, their constant companions the sound of air filtration units and the medical hardware that surrounds them. In such an environment it's difficult to focus on thoughts of getting better, of a world beyond your own white and blue room.

A pioneering project at St James's is changing that and, nearing the end of its three-year trial period, it is evaluating whether art can really help people to recover from life-threatening conditions.

The Open Window project came about when Shaun McCann, professor of haematology at St James's Hospital, went to an opening at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) with his art historian wife. Brenda Moore McCann wasn't always an art historian, in fact she met and fell in love with her husband "over a cadaver" while studying anatomy in the medical faculty at UCD.

She's also not the only person to have gone from medicine to art; at the Imma opening that night, the McCanns met both Dettie Flynn, a former nurse who had become an artist, and Alexis Bernsdorf, a former transplant patient who is also an artist. Falling into conversation, the four began to talk about whether all the wonderful art surrounding them at Imma could somehow help people recover after a severe procedure such as a bone-marrow or stem-cell transplant.

Art in hospitals is generally agreed to be "a good thing", although a great deal of it is confined to lobbies, corridors and other public areas. And while much of it is good, an awful lot is not terribly groundbreaking or adventurous. One of the most influential studies to date, by Roger Ulrich in the US, looks at art in design terms, and notes that the "best" art in hospitals depicts nature.

While it's hard to argue with the fact that a nice photograph of trees and maybe a lake is better to look at than a jarring piece of "difficult" contemporary art, or indeed a blank wall, art in health hasn't always been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny - until now. With support from the Bone Marrow for Leukaemia Trust (BMLT), the Board of St James's Hospital, Cancer Research Ireland, and the Vodafone Foundation Ireland, the Open Window Project has been using scientific tests and standards to evaluate just how much environment and art interventions can help people to recover from serious illnesses such as cancer.

Putting together a team including composer Denis Roche, physicist Fran Hegarty and Catherine McCabe, a lecturer at the Trinity College school of nursing, the McCanns set about devising an art project that might really make a difference. One of the major problems is that the environment in each isolation room for transplant patients is so hostile to any of the things that might make it a nicer place to be. Everything has to be able to be thoroughly disinfected, because following a transplant the immune system is in a very fragile state. Patients are also initially very sick and weak, and any complicated control system would be too much for them to cope with. What Open Window gives them is essentially a hand-held remote device, which allows them to choose between images, video and music that are projected on to the wall in front of the bed.

With different channels, including "classic" art, contemporary art, video clips, and digital "postcards", Open Window can, quite literally, transport you from your room and your immediate situation.

Artists who have made work for Open Window, or who have contributed existing works, include Barrie Cooke, Nick Miller, Sheila Gorman, John Gerrard, Brian Maguire, Philip Napier, Louise Walsh and Mick O'Kelly. Some of the pieces are digital art works, such as Gerrard's Smoke Tree, while others are specially made photographic diaries such as Cathy Fitzgerald's walk with her dog along country lanes, or Paul O'Connor's scenes from a trip to India. Fran Hegarty himself made a mesmerising piece for Open Window, of wavelets lapping on the lake shore at Lough Key.

"I'm a physicist, so I start to see wave motion everywhere," he says. "Wave motion is the way energy is transferred in the universe." Roche made another, of a boat journey through dappled sunlight along a river. He also composed soundtracks, which both soothe and distract from the omnipresent hum of the hospital air filtration systems. Meanwhile, the support of the Vodafone Foundation Ireland has meant that camera phones can be given to patients' families, or be set up in a favourite place, such as a country lane or hillside, to photograph the scenes and send them back to the hospital room.

This facility took on a greater significance for Martin Slevin, whose wife Mairead gave birth to their first child while he was being treated. "I think it works best," he says, "when the things you are seeing mean something to you.

They gave a camera to my family, and half an hour after Sinead was born, I had a picture of her and Mairead projected on my wall. They could send more in and Denis would update them. I looked at her over and over again and I'd think I should be on the other side of town with her. But it was amazing to have it."

Open Window is also not all "art" as you might understand "art" to be. Two of my favourite clips are scenes of country life. Cow Cam and Horse Cam are simple 15-minute films of summer fields with cows, calves, horses and foals snoozing, eating, swishing at flies with their tails, and ambling contentedly around. I could have watched them for hours.

Roche says the art lies in the interactions between patients and the projected images, rather than in each image being "art" itself. This idea, known in the art world as "relational aesthetics", is interesting enough, although one of the reasons Open Window works so well is that the theory of it all doesn't impinge on the flow of images and sounds that genuinely do take you away from the room itself. Roche describes this process as "aesthetic absorption". "When people connect and project themselves into the work," he says, "that's when it's working, that's when the art has taken place."

As Catherine McCabe says, "It's about space, not entertainment. The room is blue and white and patients say 'It's made for sick people,' which is true. Afterwards some say they tend to look at things more, and some don't want to think about their time here, but the biggest response is a sense of connection."

Slevin has nothing but praise for Open Window and St James's. "They say so much about the state of our health service, but I got five-star treatment. I was so sick to start with. The first lot of chemo didn't work, so I went straight on to the second with a higher dose, and from that to a transplant. I was in the room for three months, and I only came out three times to get X-rays. I'm a culchie," he continues, tongue slightly in cheek. "I'm from the middle of the country, and some of the art I'd look at and wonder 'Why on Earth did they do that?', but I loved the one of cows in a field, and there was one of a river that was very peaceful."

Former patient Helen O'Reilly is also in little doubt about how much Open Window helped. "I'm a country girl and it brought the country into the room with me, there was nice music too. When you're there you have no contact with other patients, so it's an outlet, and it gave me something to think about other than myself."

"We keep questioning things," says Roche, "asking why have art here? How is this helping? How can we keep the patient at the centre of everything we do? How can we measure its effects?"

"We're in a medical sciences temple here," adds Hegarty. "Everything that happens here is empirical and can be measured. Your response to a sprig of lilac or a film of a summer field doesn't fit into that. Everything is controlled here, from the air you breathe to the food you eat, we're finding space for something to feed your soul as well as your body."

Eight of the 21 rooms at the haematology department at St James's are fitted with Open Window, although now the three-year trial is drawing to a close, more money will be necessary to keep the project going. With interest from both art and research groups around the world, the work being done here will hopefully be able to continue to make a difference to the lives of the thousands of people who are saved by transplants every year. It also shows just what art and science can achieve when they start to work together.

[ info@openwindow.ie ]