As a part of a residency targeted on palliative care, Irish artist John Conway has developed a cellular printing press that may be wheeled to a affected person’s bedside to provide prints capturing their ideas and feelings as they close to loss of life.
Conway labored with Dublin-based fabricator Area Varieties to assemble the trolley, which was knowledgeable by references together with bar carts, medication dispensers and conventional printing presses.
Key purposeful components embrace wood drawers for holding paper, phrase blocks that sufferers can use to assemble phrases and sentences, together with a surface-mounted press and a pull-out drying rack.
Conway, who has spent the previous decade engaged on socially engaged initiatives, designed the printing press as a device for documenting and sharing sufferers’ emotions with family members or the broader public.
“In plenty of instances, the artworks could be the very last thing these individuals put down on paper, or the final word assertion to a cherished one, so there’s an urgency and significance to capturing what they must say,” he stated.
The challenge was developed in response to Inventive Eire‘s callout for concepts aimed toward enhancing well being and wellbeing by way of collaborations between artists and native healthcare suppliers.
His preliminary response to the inventive callout was to suggest a prolonged interval of analysis and growth that concerned spending time with sufferers and workers at Naas Common Hospital in County Kildare, as a part of a residency programme referred to as Did I Ever Inform You.
“I typically discover that one of the best ways to make artwork in these contexts is to firstly not make artwork in any respect, however as an alternative to go and spend time listening and attempting to grasp what is going on on,” he advised Dezeen.
By combining enter from healthcare employees with desk analysis, Conway developed a vocabulary of phrases related to care that fashioned the premise for the phrase blocks.
The choice to pick roughly 200 related phrases fairly than utilizing a letterpress system launched parameters that pace up the printmaking course of, in addition to making it simpler and fewer daunting for sufferers.
So as to have the ability to deliver the challenge to the sufferers, Conway realised the printing press wanted to be cellular and due to this fact started engaged on a model with wheels that resembles hospital gear.
“I actually needed it to really feel prefer it was a part of the healthcare set-up, in order that it fitted in with the visitors you see in a hospital hall,” he claimed.
“As curious because it appears to be like, it was designed to appear as if it is meant to be there, so it turns into accepted as a part of the infrastructure.”
The trolley’s tubular steel body is completed in a playful pastel-pink hue, with translucent blue aspect panels including a contrasting pop of color that helps it to seize consideration on the wards.
“I do need it to show heads and in addition lean into the eccentricities that folks count on from an artwork challenge,” Conway defined, including that sufferers’ curiosity can result in referrals and new conversations.
The artist sometimes begins the method by assembly sufferers with out the printing press to be taught extra about them and what they could wish to get out of working with him.
He then suggests phrases based mostly on their earlier conversations or invitations sufferers to circle phrases on a print containing the entire accessible choices. The phrases and their positioning will be adjusted iteratively till a passable consequence is achieved.
Having spent most of 2025 conducting analysis and evolving the idea that led to the printing press, Conway is continuous to work on methods of integrating an ongoing arts programme inside the care system.
A group of prints from the challenge will probably be framed and put in at Naas Common Hospital as an archive. Others will probably be gifted to sufferers’ households and family members, or positioned within the hospital’s solace rooms when a affected person has died.
“What I’ve learnt from this challenge is that in a healthcare context, artists can function as a sort of curious outsider, permitting sufferers to create one thing based mostly on open and trustworthy discussions,” Conway stated.
Different designs for loss of life which have not too long ago been featured on Dezeen embrace collective urns and a system that detects when somebody dies alone.
The images is by Evanna Devine.
