Ella Doran 
Ella Doran for Children's Wards
East-London based designer Ella Doran has been commissioned by Vital Arts to transform children's wards. In this pioneering commission, Vital Arts and Ella Doran have worked closely with NHS procurement, to create a series of designs which challenge conventions of interior design for hospital wards. Ella Doran's unique sensibility, which finds magic and play in the everyday world, has turned institutional spaces into environments full of colour and intrigue, providing positive distraction for the young patients coping with a difficult situation.
Ella's designs for privacy curtains give patients a playful panoramic view of the Thames in Central London with hot air balloons and kites. The reverse of the curtains reveal contrasting colours that complement the hospital furniture. Bedside cabinets that were once drab and uniform are now covered with images of the Thames. In addition, over-bed tray tables offer alternative views into a lush London garden or onto origami boats floating on a pond.
Lemn Sissay
Acclaimed poet Lemn Sissay will be leading workshops this autumn with young patients to create a series of site specific poems for the new children's hospital wards and dining areas. Sissay will be working with internationally acclaimed graphic designer Morag Myerscough to bring ward spaces to life with children's words and poems.
Lemn Sissay was born in 1967 of Ethiopian parents. Fostered as a baby, he was sent to a children's home at 11. His first collection of poetry was published when he was 20, and his plays have been produced by Contact Theatre and Radio 4. Sissay was recently writer in residence at the South Bank Centre and he is the first poet to have been commissioned for the Olympics.
www.lemnsissay.com
Morag Myerscough 
Morag Myerscough studied graphic design at St Martin's School of Art, London (1983-1986) and the Royal College of Art & Design (1986-1988). Morag set up her own cross-disciplinary design practice, Studio Myerscough, in 1993. Myerscough uses text and colour to transform architectural spaces. Recent work includes design for V&A Museum, Barbican, Westminster Academy and The Deptford Project.
www.studiomyerscough.com
Blaise Drummond for Critical Care 
Artist Blaise Drummond has created a stunning new commission for the Critical Care Unit at the Barts and the London Children's Hospital. Drummond creates paintings and sculptural installations in which clean lines of modernism are frozen in time within serene and delicate landscapes. For his commission for Vital Arts, Drummond has collaged paintings with found elements from nature. A rock, a nest of twigs and a tree branch are juxtaposed with painted mountains, decorative wallpapers and veneer tree trunks. In Drummond's work, modernism is recalled as a search for beauty, simplicity and a better way of life. The tensions between rational architectural form and irrational nature and between the organic and inorganic; are depicted with stillness and grace. Drummond's work has been developed in response to the specific architecture of the new Barts and the London Children's Hospital and creates new relationships between the internal spaces and the outside world for patients, families and staff.
Blaise Drummond was born in Liverpool in 1967 and lives and works in Ireland. He studied at Edinburgh University 1985-89, National College of Art and Design Dublin 1990-94 and Chelsea College of Art 1997-98. His solo exhibitions include Things to Make and Do, at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin, 2008 and Lake Shore Drive at Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles in 2007. Recent group exhibitions include Utopia Ltd. at the Wexford Art Centre, 2011 and I'm Always Touched by your Presence, Dear, at IMMA, Dublin, 2008.
Humans Since 1982, Clock Clock
Humans Since 1982's Clock Clock
A bespoke clock designed by Humans Since 1982 has been commissioned by Vital Arts for the new Royal London Children's Hospital. The clock is comprised of 24 analogue clocks that together configure digital numerals. Every minute that passes is animated by the mechanics of each individual clock's motion. The clocks work together to make the passing of time a delightful and intriguing process.
Per & Bastian were both born in 1982. Per grew up in the city and Bastian grew up in the countryside. They both graduated in 2009 from HDK, the school for design and crafts in Gothenburg, Sweden. They have been collaborating since 2008. This will be their first public commission in the UK. The original Clock Clock is available through Philips de Pury, New York.
Cottrell & Vermeulen
Visualisations of the Garden and Play spaceArchitects Cottrell & Vermeulen, winners of our RIBA competition to design the internal and external play spaces for the new children's hospital, are currently working closely with patients and staff to develop their designs to create unique and dynamic spaces for the hospital.
Cottrell & Vermeulen are an award winning architectural practice which has been designing for education and the community for almost twenty years. Their work is characterised by extensive collaboration through workshops and consultations with clients, users, stakeholders and children. The firm's design ethos is to provide a contemporary expression of a community's activities. Each project starts with an investigative approach and an open mind so that the built form will be closely tied to the needs of both the user and surrounding area, providing exciting, provocative, inspiring and practical solutions to fundamental problems.
www.cottrellandvermeulen.co.uk
Katharine Morling
Following her residency on the paediatric wards, award-winning ceramicist Katharine Morling will develop intriguing sculptural objects based on participant's treasured possessions and stories. Morling's distinctive black and white ceramics will then go on display as a permanent commission in the new hospital building.
Morling, recently awarded the World Craft's Council Award in 2010, employs personal and imagined narratives that are rendered as drawings then take 3D form in clay. As she says, ‘My work is a montage of my life experiences. The interaction of images and emotions in my mind overlap in time and place as I put them into clay and.this creates a surreal feeling within the piece'.
www.katharinemorling.co.uk
Fundraising for the Children's Hospital Art Strategy
Vital Arts is currently fundraising for the arts strategy for the new children's hospital at The Royal London. The art strategy aims to ensure that key and sometimes stressful spaces in the new children's hospital - routes to theatres, treatment rooms and waiting areas, will have distracting, colourful and playful art to help patients and their families cope with being in hospital. Please view our Art Strategy here
So far we have raised almost £167,700 towards our overall £400,000 target for the art strategy for the new children's hospital.
If you would like to help us please click link below to make a donation:
http://www.thebiggive.org.uk/donate/rlch
