Car park creates community art exhibition

An eye-catching new art exhibition has been launched at York Hospital using one of its most unusual spaces to date - the hospital’s multi-storey car park.

The exhibition features a selection of the banners commissioned by City of York Council to be hung on the city walls as part of the Tour de France celebrations in July. The colourful banners are based on a heraldic pennant, and have been designed and painted by sixty different community groups working with local artists.

The hospital is displaying around a third of the collection of sixty banners around the external faces of the car park until the end of November.

Kat Hetherington, Arts and Design Manager, said: “This is the first time the car park has been used for artwork and we’re getting really good feedback from visitors for the bright and colourful welcome to York Hospital. The banners have had so much work put into them and look so beautiful that we were delighted when we were given permission to exhibit.

“It’s brilliant to be able to display artwork lovingly created by the community we serve, and we hope to use this as an exhibition space again in the future.”

Artists Emily Harvey, Kirstie Briggs Bateman and Griselda Goldsbrough worked with community groups around the city on the pennant theme. The banners have three dividing sections depicting what the group does, information about the group and a section about York.

Emily Harvey said: “It’s been an exciting project to work on, attempting to represent the local communities in this way for such a special occasion has never been done before. We visited groups aged from 2 to 90 years old and worked with them to help create a design that would represent them. We really weren’t sure what would happen so it was great fun to watch a blank banner turn into a colourful design, sometimes within hours!”

28 October 2014