John Radcliffe Bereavement Ward commission

As the NHS celebrated its 75th birthday last month, I wanted to celebrate a small commission I have just completed at the John Radcliffe in Oxford with Lara Sparey.

I was honoured to win this Artist's Commission back in January this year for the Butterfly Suite in The Women’s Centre at the Hospital. The Butterfly Suite is for families who have suffered a bereavement as well as mothers whose babies are premature and in Special Care and may suffer a loss.

It is here, in the rooms and corridors surrounding this roof garden that Staff support parents in their loss and help them create memories of their baby. The brief was to create a programme of artwork for the Butterfly Suite to uplift the spaces, for staff and patients, to add colour and to unify the areas from the inside out, and vice versa.

After my site visit, I knew that I wanted to wrap the floor-to-ceiling windows with an oversized, colourful garden of flowers, and evoke a feeling of protection from the overhanging leaves from above as you walk down the corridors that surround the roof garden. I chose willow tree leaves, as a tree symbolic of humans' capability to withstand hardship, and loss. New trees can be rooted from cuttings with ease, and it's also seen as a survivor and a symbol of rebirth. I have always personally loved to stand under these trees in the heat of the summer and peer through the leaves, which is how I photographed them for this project.

I was thrilled to bring Lara Sparey Designs onto the project to collaborate with her as a fellow designer, a multi-talented one at that, and a bereaved parent herself. 🤍🙏🏽🕊

Lara's design practise focuses on metal artworks for public realm projects, which was perfect for the tiled wall for this commission.

The staff were clear they wanted butterflies, so we brought those through both as vinyl on the windows and on the wall mural that Lara designed. Echoing the garden of flowers, she focussed on the fern leaves, with the butterflies rising up from the foliage and the birds that carry your eye northwards. The colour combinations had to work across the wall and the windows and not be too overpowering, alongside a limited palette to fit with the budget.

We could only choose 3 colours plus white, but when combined across the tiled wall, one’s eye beautifully makes out a multitude of greens as the light changes across the surface area.

It is a humbling process for a designer working in this realm, designing spaces that need to support people healing, and going through difficult emotions alongside both physical and mental pain. The instal day was an emotional one, as loss touches us all at some point in our lives, but everyone, fabricators, staff, the Gardner, and Mark all got fully involved, which made it an unforgettable event.