Chester Hospital Commission.

A blank canvas.

In June 2007, Frailloop received a call from Chester Hospital, for a series of sculptures for a court yard and a workshop exploring art and recycling.

The sculptures needed to be finished by 15th September, the date of the hospital open day. The open day was an opportunity for the hospital to open it's doors to the community and for former patients to return in better health. The brief was to create a series of sculptures out of recycled materials some of which would be scrap machinery and materials from the hospital itself.

The hospital liked Frailloop's style, the way that in some sculptures the finished product does not hide the material's roots. It's not disguised.

Chester Hospital is a large foundation hospital, built round a series of courtyards and this project was part of a plan of sustainable regeneration throughout the hospital.

Part of the difficulty of working with the courtyards previously, was the lack of sunshine coming in due to the surrounding buildings. With the plants finding it difficult to grow it was hard to encourage wild life to enter the courtyards.

Finding scrap to recycle.
Photo credit: Kerry Hodgkiss

This was added to from materials found over the next few days. For example a car tyre was rescued from a local ditch, showing how Frailloop not only recycles but cleans up the environment at the same time!

The materials were taken back to the studio, studied and explored, looking for inspiration.

What had been collected was broken up so that the recycling process could start.

And slowly the whole project started to take shape. The idea was to bring life into what had been a quite sparse area.

The idea behind the workshop was to involve people in the open day, to allow them to be included in making a mark in the courtyard and to make a statement about the hospitals commitment to rejuvenation and the use of recycling. The art to be created needed to be simple enough to be able to involve everyone and also really engage them in an imaginative process of recycling.

Using pieces of broken up wooden pallet as a blank postcard, workshop participants were encouraged to think up their own ideas in a similar to style to the Frailloop approach. There was a choice of raw material and some thick marker pens to give people a bit more freedom and flexibility in what they could produce. Some people really found the process difficult.

"What do you want me to do?" they asked.

"It's not for me to tell you. It's up to you to use your imagination." But with help from the experienced Frailloop artist over 50 eager artists proudly produced their first sculpture.

The finished courtyard.

Birds and tree.

Some of the famous Frailloop snails.

Flowers in place.

The tree bringing birds
into the courtyard.

Birds.