Selkirk artists create for BGH
Artist John Berry with his artwork installation in the Margaret Kerr Unit at the Borders General Hospital.
SELKIRK artists are among seven creatives whose work will hang in the new palliative care unit at Borders General Hospital.
John Berry’s collage of the Borders landscape was positioned in the day lounge of the Margaret Kerr Unit on Tuesday.
The former illustrator said: “I’m pleased with it, I think it works well and covers all the areas I was hoping for.”
Long-established Selkirk artists Annika Sandstrom and David Kaplan, of Lindean Glass, have also contributed to the wing. They created a free-standing glass panel, which Annika was installing in the window of the unit’s family room on Tuesday.
She explained: “It’s a meditative piece in white and greys. It will absorb the natural light and it will change depending on the light and the colour of outside.”
John’s piece, showing birds, land and a river as the birds fly out to sea, measures 3.6m long and almost a metre high.
“It’s got the feel and colour and flow of the landscape. It’s quite a textural piece with bits of paper mixed with paint and the plaster stuck on birds. I wanted the feeling of a journey,” he said. “It was an important space to make homely and comfortable and it contributes to that.”
The Selkirk Wasps Studio artist said: “It’s a lovely project to be involved with. I almost didn’t put in for it, but I did and thought it would be quite a big project. It’s a good public space and it’s an important building, and things just took off. It was exciting.”
As a young illustrator, fresh from Hull College of Art, John worked in the popular animation film, The Snowman.
“I did some of the background scenes and some of the figures that fly through the air,” he said.
There followed a decade of working in illustration, mostly for travel books and general editorial pieces.
He then spent a few months illustrating in Istanbul before returning to Britain.
“I was always painting as well, but when I came back to Kent in the 1990s I established my painting more.”
He has been one of the Wasps Studio artists since 2003.
Other pieces at the £4.1million facility, set to open in January, are a mural on the wall of the main entrance which Edinburgh-based landscape artist Kate Downie will finish on Tuesday. Innerleithen sculptor Angela Hunter has created two bronze Border Leicester lambs which stand a metre high on stone outside the unit and Jedburgh artist Clair Norris’ mosaic wall panel brightens a day room.
Glass artist Keiko Mukaide from Edinburgh is creating a glass panel on top of reflective paint along a corridor, with her main piece a glass discus at the nurses’ station.
NHS Borders plans to hold open days at the unit for the public and staff next Friday (December 14) and the following Thursday (December 20).
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Weather for Selkirk
Friday 24 May 2013
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