Art in Øya Health and Welfare Centre

Artists: Elisabeth Engen; Karin Aurora Lindell: Glass decoration/design; Vidar Koksvik: ‘Chandelier’; Ole Martin Lund Bø: ‘Doxa; ’Trude Westby Nordmark: ‘Candy’ og ‘Trans’; Rintala Eggertsson Architects: ’Edge’; Lars Paalgard & Per Jonas Lindström: ‘Stringplay’ 2008/2009. Art consultants: Grethe Fredriksen & Astrid Findreng.
The public art project at Øya Community Hospital is extensive and costly. The building towers in the landscape, literally and artistically. The works cover most of the six floors of the building, and most of the works are available to the general public. In the entrance area, the Finnish artist and architect Sami Rintala and his colleague Dagur Eggertsson has provided the building with curved railings, one part painted and the other made from rusty steel plates. In the canteen and library, Lars Paalgard and Per Jonas Lindström have jointly contributed to the atmosphere and character of the room, as their highly ambitious and original audio-visual work ‘Strengelek’ spans over two floors. Attached to a grand piano suspended above the floor of the library, a range of strings or wires that may be played on have been stretched out, extending from the library ceiling down to the canteen area. Playing the strings occurs at the ceiling level, and viewers have to crane their necks in order to view the installations and objects that pass along the strings and wires. In the auditoriums on the ground floor, Ole Martin Lund Bø has made his characteristic mark, with fragments created from signs and figures on the side walls.
Moving upwards in the building, the glass artist Vidar Koksvik’s chandeliers in the stairwell are striking and eye-catching. These functional works of art unfurl as soft, bent flower stems, shining flowers, and long, slender leaves. Each chandelier has one predominant colour with a hint of green and blue in the transparent glass. The west-facing corridor on the first floor has a considerable collection of glass art of an entirely different character. On the partition leading to the offices and meeting rooms, Karin Aurora Lindell has made her visual mark on many of the windows. Each window has received an identical fine grid, but in varying colours, that are enhanced and altered by the changing light. On the ground floor and second floor, ceramic artist Trude Westby Nordmark has an original application of her material. She has designed two suites of furniture, one inside and one outside, on the terrace where the view towards city is attractive. Outdoors, the suite of furniture is illuminated from below and ‘hovers’ in the dark on a blue ‘pillow’ of light, and is thus transformed into a sculpture. On each of the three uppermost floors, in two wards, an artist in wood, Elisabeth Engen, has decorated three columns in the day rooms. One column has a combined pattern of wooden stakes and other pieces of wood, the second has carved panels, and the third has plugs attached to it. Each column corresponds to a circular work of art hanging on the end wall of an adjoining corridor; the technique and colours in the corridor works of art – a combination of painting and natural woodwork – are recognisable from the columns.
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