I’m so delighted to be part of this beautiful project. My name is Jennifer Williams. I’m the Creative Projects Manager for the Edinburgh Futures Institute. It must have been early in 2022 when I first began hearing about Jimmy Turner and their idea for a project called ‘Recycling a Hospital’. Jimmy had learned that the Edinburgh Futures Institute was moving into the old building on Lauriston Place that used to be the Royal Infirmary. I’ll let them tell the rest of that part of the story, but by the time I met Jimmy, I was hoping to take forward the collaboration.
Jimmy is so thoughtful and attentive to detail – a person whose humanity, creativity and concern for the welfare of others shines. Jimmy is also an extremely talented woodworker, as well as being Research Fellow for The Binks Hub and an anthropologist. From our first conversations, I was so grateful to Jimmy for thinking up this brilliant idea and to be working with them on this project.
We also knew from the start that we wanted EFI Creative Projects Intern Gintare Kylute on our team; an extraordinary person flowing over with kindness, creativity, innovative ideas and energy. Gintare is a fabulous photographer, and between Jimmy’s woodworking skills, Gintare’s photography experience and my interest in poetry, we knew we had an interesting set of tools accumulating.
Earlier discussions with my manager and head of the Culture and Community Team at EFI, the wonderful Patricia Erskine, suggested that we would be working with the Wood Workshop at the Grassmarket Community Project and the Pelican Nurses League, a community of nurses who trained at the Royal Infirmary when it was based on Lauriston Place.
I kept thinking about this project as the perfect opportunity to mark and celebrate the transition of the building from that of hospital to futures institute. So much emotion, so much memory, so much pain and trauma, so much joy, must reside in that building – so many ghosts. So many people born there – including some of our staff at EFI, so many who will have passed away there. How important for us, as we enter the ‘new’ building, to pause and mark, remember, hold our hands to our hearts and thank all those who have walked these halls before us, and for us to carry their stories with us as we write ours. I knew I wanted to run a series of poetry workshops with the Pelican Nurses and community members to help gather some of these memories and emotions. We will run these workshops in late 2023, and text from some of the poems created will become part of this project, as will documentary photographs taken by Gintare not only of the process, but of the people involved as well.
Jimmy met with Patricia and the extraordinary Ingrid Heersche, EFI Delivery Senior Project and Programme Manager. They toured the building site and selected a number of objects that might be of use for our project. Over time, Jimmy landed on two materials for Recycling a Hospital – floor joists and roof slates. I loved how Jimmy described these materials for our project: making new use of boards which once supported the bodies of those who worked, studied and were cared for in the hospital, and roof slates that sheltered these bodies from the elements.
Jimmy has been in charge of initial design ideas for what the art object might look like that would be fashioned out of the floor boards and have the slates incorporated into/onto it in some way. We soon met with Jon Slight, the ingenious and generous Workshop Manager from the Grassmarket Community Project Wood Workshop, and also brought on Gus Fisher, a stone carving artist of exquisite talent with a truly original approach to design down to the notion of what a letter is, what meaning is contained within each mark, and in the spaces – the silences – between.
This is only the beginning and I hope it piques your interest as it has ours… but I can’t finish this post without sharing a photo of what Jimmy presented me with at the beginning of one of our recent meetings – this sweetly scented box that they had made for me as a gift, and a ‘test’ object out of some of the wood from the hospital.
Not only is the object itself SO precious and beautiful, but the thinking Jimmy put into it – into how to fashion it but also into what the knot at the front represented, what the radiating lines around it represented – a rising or setting sun, and how to reflect that in the lid (made from another type of wood, though correspondingly radiant and almost iridescent), moved me very much. I almost wept at this gift, which was such an example to me of the power of attending to that which otherwise might be lost, the power of recycling, and of art, and of friendship.
