A year in a Scottish hospital

JENNY Richardson contracted polio and spent a year in the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital, in Edinburgh.

It was the early 1950s, and Richardson was aged four. Her family lived in Libya, where her father, an army doctor, ran a British military hospital. The family was separated for the year. Richardson’s experience is commemorated in ‘Eat Your Porridge’, her new, solo exhibition at the Sarah Walker Gallery, in Castletownbere, Co Cork.

“I made the work about four years ago,” says Richardson. “There was nothing much happening out in the art world and I watched a television programme about young artists, who were all making work about their childhood. I just thought, ‘I might do a painting of my memories of when I was in hospital,’ which is the most traumatic thing that had happened in my childhood. It was very etched in memories. One painting turned into another and another, until there were ten.”

Painting was cathartic for Richardson, who was encouraged by Sarah Walker to publicly display the work.

“When I showed the paintings to Sarah, she thought they would make a great show,” says Richardson. “I’m still in two minds about it; will I be able to stand around in front of all this torture of children. It was just my story and there was a lot worse things going on in that period. It was the 1950s, all the poor little children in war-torn Europe were in a much worse state. The general times were a bit harsh.”

The paintings are dark. Richardson depicts the staff from the shoulders down, as her memory dictated an absence of personality.

Sister Swan, whom Richardson remembers as stern but fair, is acknowledged in a portrait, in which she is treated in a softer light.

The images are based on Richardson’s memory, as she has no other record. This child-like perspective gives the hospital wards and exercise pool a menacing atmosphere.

“I didn’t refer to photos, or anything, of that time,” says Richardson. “A lot of your childhood memories can be taken from photo albums and what people tell you.

“But I was out of my family, at the time, for a year, so I was able to isolate these as completely my memories. It’s amazing how many kept emerging as I kept on doing the paintings. My sense of humour would come through. The very first one I did is this little, tiny tragic figure lying on a board. They got a bit more typical of me as I went on. They are quite comical.”

A book accompanies the exhibition, with an introduction by Philip Boxberger. While Boxberger first met Richardson as an adult, he, too, had spent time recuperating from polio in the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital, about ten years after Richardson.

“The book includes my father’s letters,” says Richardson. “The time I was in hospital, my father wrote illustrated letters. He decorated the envelopes with little soldiers, and that sort of thing, being an army man.

“He was an army doctor, so he put all these little soldiers on hospital beds.”

* ’Eat Your Porridge’ opens this Saturday at 5pm and runs until Jul 28.