Client: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Overview

The overarching concept of this work is focused on the patient’s journey and providing a sense of inspiration, hope and community.

Playing off the adjacent rivers as well as the city’s industrial past, I focused on the history of glass artisans and manufacturers who impacted the area. A lesser-known fact about the city is that glass manufacturing predated that of steel and in fact, the Monongahela River was used to float cases of product downstream for loading and shipping.

The combination of these elements suggested images of messages in bottles and their relationship to things like wishing trees and floating lanterns – all things that carry within them the thoughts and aspirations of their creators. I envisioned hundreds of these glass vessels each filled with an individual message or wish donated by patients and staff drifting through the space and ascending as they reach the vertical entrance of the building. Appearing at first as a colorful current of glass, upon closer inspection, unique designs and shapes can be identified alluding to specific points in the city’s timeline.

Goals

This project is located in a Vision and Rehabilitation clinic in the Uptown neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Initial meetings with facility staff included Administration, Doctors, Healthcare Workers, Staff, Advocates and Neighborhood Representatives. Many, if not most of the patients and staff have had long term association with the facility and it is not uncommon for this to have been the first and only job for many staffers and to have generations of families remain as patients. It was clear that the community desired that this tradition of relationships and continuity be passed down to future generations and that it somehow needed to be represented in the artwork.

Process

In order to make this communicate the identity of the place, I wanted the bottles and their contents to have a real connection to the UPMC community. We set up a series of events to ask the community to donate bottles, notes, or objects to be put in bottles. Events were held in the existing hospital and offices and an online site was set up for remote participation. People were asked to simply share any wish our story that they wanted to share with the UPMC community. Over 500 bottles were collected along with notes, e-notes, and objects. All bottles and other donations were catalogued for use in the installation as well as to have an ongoing database. Notes and objects were put into bottles and the bottles were then sorted to fit into the overall composition. Suspended in the main entrance corridor of the facility with fine stainless-steel cables, they appear as if flowing together toward the building entrance and magically drifting upwards.

Messages and contributions will be continuously collected and added to a publicly accessible online database and the piece will be periodically updated so that it can continue to grow and evolve with the space.