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Hospital Chapel and Meditation Room Art Glass

 

Happy 2015! From myself and everyone here at the studio, best wishes for happiness, prosperity, and good health.

That last piece seems especially important right now. For one thing, so many people seem to be kicking off the new year with the flu. Here’s hoping all those nasty bugs disappear fast!

Every new year, I like to reflect on where I’ve been and where I’m heading – and this time around, I’ve been interested to realize that I’m working more and more in healthcare facilities. It’s a simultaneously poignant and edifying development. While healthcare is, for better or worse, a rapidly growing industry, one bit of silver lining is that hospitals increasingly are investing in art as they recognize its healing properties (more on this subject here). Some of the most obvious avenues that health providers are taking include artful facades (like this one) on building exteriors, and paintings, photography, and sculptures to decorate interiors.

However, there’s also an interesting, compelling little niche for which I’ve found opportunities, and that is hospital chapel and meditation room art glass.

 

 

There’s a long tradition of hospitals recognizing the role of spirituality in healing, but hospital chapels historically have tended toward a limited few faith traditions. Not anymore. These days, hospitals are rapidly transforming those spaces to provide interfaith chapels and meditation rooms, welcoming of people practicing all religions as well as those who are non-religious but might enjoy a peaceful refuge. It’s a heartening phenomenon that poses an excellent design challenge: How do you create a space that is appropriate and inviting for such a broad range of belief systems and practices?

Enter the wonderful medium of glass. In my collaborations with institutions like Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel and architect Hunton Brady, shown above, I aimed to create a glass installation that would bring meditative color, light, and pattern to the space without using imagery specific to any single faith tradition. Referencing stained glass yet decidedly modern, this work becomes a prominent feature of the space, keeping it flexible to accommodate any kind of service or practice with portable chairs, kneelers, prayer rugs, icons, literature, etc. Additionally, the installation is visible to the outer hallway yet translucent, offering a sense of beauty and possibility both within and beyond the chapel while maintaining privacy for its visitors.

 

 

More on this subject to come. In the meantime, to see some other examples of hospital chapel and meditation room art glass, click here.