Toronto artist transforms salvaged material into sculptures for hospitals

It's an unusual sight in a hospital lobby: a table with an eclectic collection of salvaged and saved items like charcoal, rocks and fragments of the inside of a piano.

The bits and pieces are being suspended from the ceiling at West Park Healthcare Centre as part of a sculpture, one of Dennis Lin's latest art installations at a GTA health-care facility. 

"I make mobiles, it's part of my visual language," said the Toronto-based artist.

"We're looking at brass, bronze, wood, salvaged materials I've collected over the years and arranged in a composition that is hopefully magical, whimsical and playful," he said.

Lin says he hopes his art provides some relief to patients, families and staff in what can be a very stressful environment. University Health Network also recognizes the benefits of art in its facilities and has been growing its art program at the recently opened hospital.

Part of Lin's artistic process involves saving and recycling items. In this particular piece, titled Milky Way, he's also used material from the hospital's prosthetics and orthotics department.

Milky Way is the third installation Lin has done in a health-care setting. He also recently completed mobiles at SickKids and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Those projects invited the patients to be a part of the process.

"We've created patient workshops where we work together to inform the mobiles, so that's been a really wonderful opportunity," he said.

UHN wants to see more public art

One of the goals with the sculpture installation is having more health-care settings consider their facilities as canvases for public art, said Susan MacDonald, art strategy lead at the University Health Network (UHN).

MacDonald says public art has always been a part of places like schools and libraries, and now that trend is starting to catch on in hospitals.

"Very few of us have not had an experience with hospitals, and it offers a diversion for patients when they're anxious about their care, worried about their outcomes, and it gives them a place to contemplate and think differently and escape a bit from their health=care experience," MacDonald said.

She says she took on this role after decades of working in health care and observing the importance of art and nature in the field.

"Hospitals are a high pressure environment and it provides that respite for staff and visiting families as well," she said.

West Park Healthcare Centre has been adorned with 300 pieces of art since the hospital opened in April, and the plan is to continue growing its art program.

For Lin, he hopes his third completed work in a hospital, which he has donated, will bring people a sense of peace.

"I think that's exactly the meaning, an opportunity for escape, positive reflection and positive distraction," Lin said.

"I feel like one of the greatest things I can do as an artist is offer somebody that opportunity."