Sabina Higgins speech launching the Saolta Arts and Summer Art Exhibition
University Hospital Galway, Tuesday, 6th August 2019
A chairde,
It is truly a pleasure to join all of you here today in University Hospital, Galway, as we formally launch the Saolta Arts and Offset Summer Art Exhibition.
May I thank Hazel Hendy, Chairperson of Saolta Arts, and Maurice Power, Chief Executive Officer of Saolta University Healthcare Group, for the invitation to launch the exhibition. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to meet those individuals bringing creativity, energy and engagement to a hospital setting and, perhaps more importantly, those benefitting from the arts programme.
Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust, now Saolta Arts, was established in 2007 to provide arts programme as a means of improving the hospital experience for patients, staff, and visitors at Galway University Hospitals. Now, as Saolta Arts, the programme has been extended to include other hospitals of the Saolta Group, including Roscommon University Hospital, Portiuncula University Hospital, Mayo University Hospital, Sligo University Hospital, and Letterkenny University Hospital.
Saolta Arts provides a multi-disciplinary programme encompassing exhibitions, participative workshops, and events and activities in the fields of music, theatre and poetry. The initiative plays an important role in nurturing the discovery and development of creative potential, encouraging new ways of seeing, understanding, appreciating, as well as stimulating fresh dialogue across its hospitals, making the hospitals a place of possibilities.
I believe access to the arts promotes well-being and enhances the hospital environment, and I applaud this initiative which I believe has real and tangible benefits for hospital patients, making what is often a stressful and unpleasant event in one’s life more agreeable and humane. Through Saolta Arts, participating patients are offered an opportunity, where suitable, to make a more positive, productive use of their time in hospital, engaging in a way that distracts from medical procedures and worries, so that “time flies”. Indeed, such engagement can be an important introduction or reintroduction to the creative arts, and can help patients to re-evaluate their abilities in the face of change or indeed adversity.
To mark the official relaunch, the Offset exhibition epitomises Saolta Arts’ efforts to humanise the hospital experience for everyone. It is the culmination of an intergenerational printmaking project which celebrates the exchange of skills and tacit, place-based knowledge across generations and hospital wards.
In a series of participative workshops in Paediatrics and Care for the Elderly settings, I understand that the youngest and oldest patients at Galway University Hospitals have been making handprinted postcards and sharing their tacit knowledge via the hospitals’ internal post. Others have used the opportunity to thank members of staff and cheer up their day.
The exhibition will feature a selection of postcards from the workshops and work by the facilitating artists to explore themes of place, a sense of belonging, and how we can share experiences from a distance.
The theme of place, its identity, and the sense of belonging and rootedness with which it provides us is something that the President and I return to frequently at events and in our addresses. It is one of the most fundamental human needs, and something with which we Irish have a deep resonance for a variety of reasons, including cultural and historical.
The Offset exhibition being launched today is truly a celebration of some of the insights and contributions that both our youngest and oldest generations make to society. I wish to thank Saolta Arts and Saolta University Hospital Healthcare Group once again for their kind invitation today, and I look forward very much to viewing some of the stimulating, heart-warming and beautiful pieces on show.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.