Event
Lingering Space is an exhibition by the Waterford Healing Arts Trust Artist in Residence Maria McKinney on view in Waterford Regional Hospital from 13 October to 11 November 2011.
In contemporary society the hospital is a space through which we are guaranteed to pass. Like an airport or train station, hospitals serve as gateways to both arriving and departing individuals. It is where we go to be made well or to receive a result. Both of these undertakings make it a place whereby a period of waiting is convention. Areas are designated for this purpose, and are signified as well as occupied by their seating. A chair is ascribed many bodily attributes: legs, arms, feet, back and head. As such it may be interpreted as a substitute in lieu of an occupant. It waits for one to wait.
Though primarily concerned with the corporeal, hospitals have an ulterior significance as non-places: places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as ‘places’.
Linked seating typifies the waiting area of the non-place. Their adjoinment is characteristic of a constant chain of people anonymous to one another but connected through a shared purpose.
McKinney’s series of drawings and digitally manipulated photographs consider the (in)action of waiting in this particular context.
For more information please contact the Waterford Healing Arts Trust on 051-842664 or e-mail WHAT@hse.ie
