ADDENBROOKES HOSPITAL
In the Mundane and the Monumental, as artist in residence at Addenbrookes Hospital, I produced a series of images whose starting point was the hospital's archive that houses artefacts, photographs and records from 1766. The archive and my experience of taking photographs and filming in the hospital, inspired my decision to explore the importance of the minutiae of the everyday life of people visiting or working in the hospital, as well as the huge changes and dramatic experiences that take place there. I used a combination of conventional photographic processes as well as digital photography, reflecting changes in technology that have taken place in recent history. Underlying and motivating the work is the desire to record and understand paradoxes that are present within it - fragility versus substance, the dramatic versus the everyday, stillness versus the passing of time. The work also explores the complex relationship between what has happened in the past and events that are occurring in the present. In this final series of images - I projected slides of some of the archival images and records onto artefacts that have been part of the hospital's long history, producing images that may conjure up personal or collective memories from the recent or distant past. The work could be seen as a series of visual memories that refer to what is absent from the present, yet at the same time transport this absence into the present. Our own interpretations of the work can help to close up some of the spaces left unfilled by the shelves in the archive.