Grennan & Sperandio, 'South Bristol 360', 2012. Photo: Jamie Woodley, courtesy of the artists and Ginkgo Projects Ltd.
Synopsis
The £45 million South Bristol Community hospital opened on 30 March 2012 following over 50 years of campaigning by people. As part of the development of the building, public art consultants Ginkgo were appointed to develop a public art strategy for the building and to lead on the selection of artists to work on the scheme. The programme of commissions includes a series of interior artworks by Grennan & Sperandio, and an expansive colour work by painter Estelle Thompson.
Grennan & Sperandio’s twelve wall-mounted artworks based on favourite views of south Bristol were installed in August 2012. Comprising of a number of vitreous enamel plaques dotted around the interior of the Hospital the plaques show unique beauty spots and places with special sentimental value to people in South Bristol.
The circular blue-and-white form of the designs was inspired by the delftware pottery which used to be made in great quantities at Water Lane, on the border of Hengrove and Brislington, and reference the form of the ‘cameo’. The views depicted were gathered from members of the public that Simon Grennan met in January 2012 while researching the area, including the Walking Health Two Hearts group, sequence dancers from Broadoak Social Club in Withywood, and students at Eagle House in Filwood and Victoria Park Primary School in Bedminster. Favourite views were also received after publicity on BBC Radio Bristol and in the Evening Post.
Among the views identified by the groups and made into the artworks are the Withywood Senior Club House which has since been demolished, birds flocking on Leinster Avenue, Coronation Road, Bristol seen from Dundry, Hengrove Park playground, Filton Broadway in the 1960s and the Balloon Festival.
The artworks were made locally by specialist sign manufacturer Wards of Bristol.
Grennan & Sperandio
Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio met at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1988 and have worked together exclusively as a team since 1990. Grennan works from north Wales, and Sperandio works from Houston, Texas.
Two things remain constant in their practice: they always work together and their work invariably involves the authorial or editorial participation of other people – other members of the public. Their work often utilizes media that are culturally compromised: chocolate, comic books and television, appearing at social sites of consumption in the home and store and on the street.
They are best known for working with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to mass produce a new chocolate bar with Sculpture Chicago program ‘Culture in Action’ (1993), for making and distributing collaboratively-made comic books in partnership with DC Comics, Fantagraphics Books and others (1995, continuing) and for the creation of two U.S. reality television series, ‘Artstar’ and ‘Artstar II’ (2006, 2008). Grennan & Sperandio worked with Colin de Land, American Fine Arts Company, from 1995. They are often seen as part of a critical history of artists whose work is focused on social narrative and social exchange. Over the last twenty years, this history of practice has been described as ‘interventionist’, ‘New Genre’, and ‘Relational’. In 2010, Bucharest Biennial curator Felix Vogel chose the term ‘handlung’ (‘acting together’) to describe the social turn in this approach to practice.
Ginkgo Projects is an independent consultancy offering art curation and commissioning services to a wide range of clients.
Our philosophy is driven by a desire to create unique opportunities for artists and designers. We aim to contribute fresh perspectives to built and natural environments that challenge assumptions about the spaces we inhabit.
Our clients include developers, local authorities, landscape and architectural practices and environmental and arts organisations. We create real opportunities for clients and artists to produce innovative work appropriate to the context, whether this is a new building or public space, work that is integrated into a space, stand-alone work or exhibition.
The £45 million South Bristol Community hospital opened on 30 March 2012 following over 50 years of campaigning by people for a local hospital. The hospital provides diagnostic tests and therapy services closer local residents and houses Bristol’s first urgent care centre for minor illnesses and injuries, day surgery and a rehabilitation service where people are able to stay as inpatients. The services are provided in a purpose built, comprehensively equipped unit with full access to all facilities and services in the hospital, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dieticians, speech and language therapy, X-rays and scans and a brand new community dental service, offering free NHS treatment for local people, provided by the University of Bristol Dental Hospital.
