George Shaw
Home, 2004
Humbrol paint and board
West Wing, St Bartholomew’s Hospital
George Shaw’s paintings often explore the landscape of his childhood home, a post war housing estate in Coventry. At Barts, Shaw has created a series of paintings that have a haunting nostalgic feel, intensely personal, but at the same time recalling a landscape common to many of us.
Shaw explains, “When I began making these paintings for the West Wing I had in mind a place of familiarity and warmth, of stories and memories and life. The place in the paintings is my own childhood home where my parents still live and where I visit often. It is a place from where we have visited hospital many times over the years and where phone calls to and from such places have been made. It is a place where, as a family, we have all returned. It was my intention that these paintings brought with them a touch of the familiar and the loved to a visit which can often make us feel isolated and removed from our daily lives”.
Shaw was born in Coventry in 1966 and educated at Sheffield Polytechnic and The Royal College of Art, London.
The award winning Barts Heath Breast Care Centre is considered a pioneering example of public art commissioning in a healthcare setting. A series of site specific commissions from leading artists are integrated with the architecture, to produce moments of contemplation; creating spaces that positively encourage distraction and discussion.
The art programme was curated for Vital Arts by Theresa Bergne of Field Art Projects, and took as its starting point the feedback that visitors would rather be ‘anywhere, but here.’ To this end, the expression of landscape explored by all the art installed offers an element of ‘transportation,’ offering viewers the opportunity to think about being ‘somewhere else,’ if only in mind.
