2. PRAISE YOU | Celebrating the staff of The NHS
Hello! Thank you for returning to this blog! Or welcome, please stay a while and read through.
I got a job as a cleaner in a hospital during the pandemic because I got made redundant. My decade long creative career came to a halt, which was depresso after finally securing myself a permanent contract at a company with amazing high spec machinery and global projects. However, in those months I felt the luxury was just being alive.
For Renaissance artists and anatomists there was little distinction between art and science: both were ways of celebrating and understanding the truth about the world.
Dr. Gavin Francis
I served some people their last cup of tea before they passed. During one shift Radiohead came on the radio and I went and silently cried in a patient toilet behind my goggles. Like, ugly cried. It was so hot behind all the PPE and I couldn’t take my gloves off in time so I just sort of stood and stared at myself in the mirror crying.
Cleaners are often overlooked but they play a vital role in the ecosystem of a hospital. Without them we would all be in big disease danger. I have seen compassion on a level that money can’t buy within the staff of The NHS. I’ve seen unfathomable tenderness on the end of a Bic razor, big smiles alongside cups of tea and then there are the serenades, the stories and the huge expanses of time.
It’s pretty wild working in a hospital, as you can imagine. Especially having never worked in one before. I found it pretty profound at first, and always a mixture of funny, dull and devastating. Overwhelmingly I found people want someone to listen to them, something I could give in a space so suffocated by the reality of mortality and alone-ness. I once held the door open for a visitor and said ‘have a nice day’ to them; not realising they had just said their final goodbyes to a loved one. I now think of the cafe in Camberwell [London] on Love Lane, opposite Kings College Hospital and consider the emotional weight it must hold from its visitors. The grief and the joy it has seen. Do the staff in there feel differently serving flat whites opposite such a busy hospital to someone who could’ve literally just become a new parent, just had an amputation, or as I had, my gum weirdly sizzled off for a biopsy (probably wouldn’t be getting a hot coffee in this scenario.)
At work a patient once called me over, on a cardiac ward. Through a heavy Glaswegian accent he said to me with a cheeky grin on his face ‘miss, the doctor has forgotten to put my heart back in’ holding up a small round, red call buzzer. ‘I’ll make sure to tell the surgeon’ I said laughing.
Thanks to NHS staff who so relentlessly keep us safe, sacrifice so much of their own lives only to be met with wild working conditions here in The UK. I hope the strikes will change things. I stumbled across a book called Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr. Gavin Francis and it was very moving and beautiful……
Working to diminish social inequalities is a large part of relieving suffering - something far more in the gift of politicians than it is of doctors - but what doctors can sometimes do is to offer permission to take the time needed for recovery. It all depends on what you think of as medicine, and whether you consider the doctor as charged with the dispensing of pills or with the relief of suffering. I know which one I’d prefer.
We shouldn’t have to turn to doctors for the cure of problems that are social and political in nature.
Dr. Gavin Francis
I think our bodies are some kind of sacred mad communities of cells really. Without sounding like an Evangelical Christian as I’m not one, we’re miracles baby! This is the sculpture I made in honour of the cleaners of The NHS:
Praise You (2023)
I made this sculpture Praise You (pictured above) in the summer of 2023 at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop in honour of the cleaners of The NHS and our epithelium cells in our bodies. Both of who are crucial players in the ecosystems of keeping us safe. I wanted to see what I could make in one week, with all the metal I could afford at the time - wildly affected by the costs of Brexit.
Scottish Sculpture Workshop is an arts organisation in rural Aberdeenshire. They offer a variety of residencies and open access sessions +++++. You used to have to ring up the pub if you wanted to go for a pint and they quite often said no. The rolling wild hills in the background and the rugged forests are waiting for you.
Thank you to Eden, Michael and Sara for all their help. If you would like to view videos of me making Praise You please visit here.
If you know of anyone or anywhere that would like to exhibit, display or permanently house Praise You please get in touch! I am excited to say it has recently been moved to a new temporary location at the beautiful Gellen Cottage. Disappointingly though I have not been able to find a single place to permanently exhibit it so this piece may soon get laid to rest on the scrap pile.
As Spring starts to poke its sunny head round the corner here in England, my advice is to get out in the sun and to move as much as possible, slam your body down and wind it all around to keep the serotonin going.
Thank you for reading. Catch you next time!
【ｒｅｃｏｍ ｍｅｎｄａｔｉｏｎｓ】
As a South Londoner, Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder is one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve ever listened to http://www.untoldmurder.com/ep
Goodbye to the incredible Gal-dem
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr. Gavin Francis
