An ER where students are practising the ceiling arts
Colourful scenes painted on tiles give patients a room with a view
Katerina Davies was just a kid when she broke her arm cartwheeling off a bench. But the 17-year-old still remembers a few things about the hospital. Throbbing pain. Hazy moments before surgery. And a lot of time spent staring at a blank white ceiling.
So when she and fellow students at Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts were asked to brighten the view for hospital patients lying face up, she was captivated.
“I thought it would be an amazing way to use our art,” says Davies, one of 65 visual arts students who created hand- painted tiles that now adorn the ceiling of the emergency department at North York General Hospital.
“I felt like it would be helpful to patients to realize, ‘Someone else was thinking of me.’ ”
Davies’ tile, created with a partner, depicts flowers and butterflies on a turquoise background, because “nature soothes so many people.”
The 50 pieces of ceiling artwork, roughly two feet by two feet in size, range from classical to impressionistic in style and include scenes from a starry night sky to underwater seascapes.
“Hopefully it’s just making things a little easier for someone.” EVE-LAREINE DANDAN HIGH SCHOOL ART STUDENT, WITH CEILING TILE SHE PAINTED FOR NORTH YORK GENERAL
“I learned that doing something little can make a big impact,” says Davies, who saw her tile in its permanent place for the first time on Friday.
In a nearby hallway, a woman receiving oxygen on a gurney glanced up amid her distress to see a glowing landscape of a mountain and sky reflected in a lake. It was a moment’s distraction in the middle of a bustling hospital. Around the corner, patients gazing upward got other visual treats: snowy evergreens and birch trees, and, a few paces away, palm trees on a beach and a deer and fawn in the forest.
The notion of collaborating on a ceiling tile project with local students was hatched earlier this year by Andrea Ennis, nurse and clinical team manager of North York’s emergency department. She’d seen a tile painted by a volunteer years ago “and it got me thinking,” she says.
Ennis was determined to lift the spirits of the nearly 400 patients who come to the ER every day and bring warmth to the stark hospital environment. After talking to a relative who taught art, she approached nearby Cardinal Carter, an artsbased school in the Toronto Catholic District School Board.
A month later, Ennis presented her idea directly to students, who were moved by descriptions of patients she had seen — an elderly woman with hours to live who longed to see the outdoors, a distraught woman whose pregnancy was at risk lying on an examination table and a frightened young child who had to be held down while being sutured.
As the students listened, “you could hear a pin drop,” says Aurora Pagano, one of two visual arts teachers overseeing the project.
The hospital provided the fire-retardant tiles; the school provided the primer, acrylic paint — and talent. In June, the creations were strategically mounted where they will have the most impact.
“My idea of what they were going to do was not even close to what they produced,” Ennis says. “I thought we’d get cute little drawings. These are works of art.”
Not only do they calm and distract, but they can also be conversation starters between patients and staff, “reminding us there’s always a person behind the diagnosis.”
One elderly man recently brought in by an ambulance was intrigued by a tile depicting legs dangling from a dock with a view of a lake beyond. For a few minutes his misery gave way to his memories, as he recounted his summers spent outdoors.
“This gruff man came in uncomfortable and we started talking and when I walked away, he wasn’t gruff anymore,” Ennis says.
The idea of enhancing hospitals with art has caught on in recent years, in line with research that has found positive images can reduce anxiety and stress among patients.
A ceiling tile project that started 15 years ago at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre turned into a fundraiser, with sponsors paying for specific tiles painted by volunteers. Similar projects have sprung up in Scarborough, Kingston and elsewhere in Ontario.
The unique idea of partnering with local students made sense to Ennis and was also in line with Pagano’s commitment to encouraging community involvement among her budding artists. Their techniques and concepts were evaluated as class work. But marks weren’t a motivating factor for Phyllis Lam, 17. She was more interested in the opportunity to make a difference.
“This definitely stands out as one of my favourite projects and one of the most meaningful,” Lam says. All the students put their hearts and souls into it, she adds, sometimes staying in the studio for hours after school to polish every detail.
She and her partner created a soft scene with a kitten. That tile is now placed in a corridor where seniors are treated, many of whom don’t have families and are devoted to their animals, Ennis says.
Lam says when the completed tiles were assembled as a gallery, “I was really amazed to see how everyone could come up with something so different, yet unified as a whole.”
Eve-Lareine Dandan, 16, has been treated at North York General for broken bones and, more recently, pneumonia, and stared at that same ceiling. The playful tile she co-created of two dolphins swimming above a vibrant coral reef is seen by about 120 adults and children a day.
“Hopefully, it’s just making things a little easier for someone,” Dandan says.
Meanwhile, Ennis is dreaming big. She wants the partnership to grow and possibly involve other schools.
“I’m really hoping to fill every space of the emergency department,” she says. “And I’d like this to cross over to the operating rooms, post-anesthetic care unit, the ICU (intensive care unit) and eventually the whole hospital.”