“Unfolding Tales” exhibition at the Linen Hall Library, 11th January – 3rd February 2012
by Rachael Bell and Arts Care Artist-in-Residence, Cheryl Bleakley
Unfolding Tales is a collaborative storybook that unfolds into a fifteen metre-long artwork. Two artists, Rachael Bell and Arts Care Artist-in-Residence, Cheryl Bleakley invited patients from various wards in Musgrave Park Hospital to add their part to the evolving story. Patients corresponded with each other through image, letter writing and the spoken word, each creating a page of the book. Some of these artworks were also developed through workshops and correspondence with the involvement of other visual artists in Belfast and Berlin.
The Unfolded Tales spiral up the library’s central staircase under a video of a narrator, reading the story to library visitors. Images of the hospital corridor ceilings flash overhead. This is an exciting project with a beautiful aesthetic quality. It captures the richness and uniqueness of life experience as people enter and leave the hospital, their stories overlapping for a short time.
Unfolding Tales is presented as Rachael Bell’s M.A. Art in Public project at the University of Ulster.
