No one ever really wants to go to the hospital, and hospitals know it.
That’s one reason that a growing number of medical centers have filled their walls, lobbies and waiting areas with art, hoping to make what can be a worrying or painful experience for patients into something more welcoming. Being able to look at a beautiful mural or sit in a garden next to a stunning piece of sculpture is thought to be healing for patients, as they undergo tests, surgery or treatment for serious health conditions.
The art world also has taken notice that hospitals, especially those displaying high-quality works in newer, state-of-the-art buildings, have become art-filled public spaces, just as libraries, parks and shopping centers have done.
Both patients and art lovers can find aesthetic relief in two striking, large-scale illuminated sculptures on display at John Muir’s Walnut Creek Medical Center. The sculptures, by two internationally recognized Tucson-based artists, were commissioned for the hospital’s new Jean and Ken Hofmann Cancer Center, which opened in February in the gleaming, 155,000-square-foot Behring Pavilion.
Both sculptures are equipped with lights that allow them to glow at night, making them visible at all hours of the day in remarkably changing ways. The illumination means “they can reach out beyond the bounds of the sculpture itself,” says Joe O’Connell, creator of the sculpture, “Uplifting Together.” He and Barbara Grygutis, who created the second sculpture, “Regeneration,” specialize in art that uses light. For this installation, their pieces embody themes from nature that are meant to inspire hope and healing.
Visitors arriving at the pavilion’s main entrance from the parking lot will encounter Grygutis’ “Regeneration” first. Standing 20 feet tall, the sculpture consists of two, curved, elongated pieces — halves of a whole — standing on end. Their aluminum panels feature an intricate, lacy network of cutouts, through which daylight and other light sources can shine.
Grygutis, whose sculptures also grace public spaces in Santa Clara and Palo Alto, said she envisioned a seed pod, bursting open to start a cycle of new growth and life. The nature theme is especially apparent after dark, when the green lights embedded within make the sculpture glow in hues reminiscent of leaves or blades of grass, radiating out into the night sky through the lacy panels.
“Hopefully, people find it beautiful and calming,” Grygutis says. “Hospitals more and more are commissioning art as a point of interest and to create a calming environment.”
On the other side of the pavilion, visitors will find O’Connell’s “Uplifting Together,” a 19-foot-tall installation mounted against the pavilion’s outdoor facade. Tucked away at the far end of the center’s meditation garden, it’s shielded from traffic noise — and both the garden and art can be seen by patients visiting the center’s first-floor radiation and oncology department.
Joe O’Connell’s “Uplifting Together” sculpture illuminates a meditation garden at the medical center. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
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Like Grygutis, O’Connell used aluminum to create forms that seem alive with movement and growth. He shaped the metal into a vinelike “twining branch,” he says, with tendrils and softly colored orbs that rise across the wall and reach up towards sun and sky. LED lights follow the course of the tendrils and are programmed to switch on when the sun goes down, creating a gentle nighttime glow that rises up out of the garden.
O’Connell saw the “twining branch” as connected to life “in all its various forms.” It might remind some people of the human circulatory or nervous systems, he says, but you see those forms in nature as well.
O’Connell says his love of tinkering and illumination comes from growing up in New Jersey — his father was a math teacher, his mother an artist — near the West Caldwell laboratory of Thomas Edison, who helped invent and commercialize the incandescent light bulb. O’Connell says his grandfather and Edison were friends.
When O’Connell was commissioned to create the sculpture for John Muir hospital, he said his work was informed by his father and his health problems, with his father going “from one hospital to another” and spending time in a recovery facility before he could return home.
“It gave me a chance to think about what type of art people need in hospitals,” he says, especially when “they are spending long periods of time in one place or returning again and again.”
The experience also made him appreciate the unique challenges and rewards of creating art for a healthcare setting, knowing that people will come to his work with the widest range of emotions and reasons they might be there.