WITHOUT STONES THERE IS NO ARCH

Without Stones There Is No Arch (2016) is a commission for the Urgent Care Centre at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, spanning 33 vinyl murals across corridor walls, treatment rooms, and clerestory windows above patient beds. The title draws from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan that the arch holds only because of the stones that compose it; meaning and reality are formed by the specific elements that compose them. The work was commissioned in dialogue with the hospital's chromotherapy research, an ongoing study into how color frequencies affect human health. Vertical fields of saturated color; pink, blue, green, red, teal, yellow; are interleaved with large-scale photographic imagery of nature and London landmarks: cherry blossoms, tulips, the London Eye, Big Ben, ornate ceilings, bare branches. Originally conceived as one circular image, the composition unfolds across corridor spaces, treatment rooms, and windows, so that someone lying still in a cubicle and someone moving through the corridor outside are held inside the same field of color and life. Each panel is a stone; the arch is the experience of moving through it.