The Art of Caring @MaggiesCentres

This is a version of a story I wrote for The Herald newspaper, which was published on Saturday 1 August.

The first time artist Toby Paterson set foot in a Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre he says he experienced a split-second stab of anxiety.
This ‘threshold’ moment stayed in his mind as he embarked on a wide-reaching project alongside curator, Judith Winter, which would lead to him making a series of brand new works for the seven Maggie’s Centres across Scotland.
The centre in question was the Rem Koolhaas-designed building in the grounds of Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. Paterson recalls: “As I stepped inside, I was very aware of the transition from NHS to a Maggie’s Centre. The door opened and I had this flash of doubt. But I looked in and I saw Marie [(McQuade – Maggie’s Development Director] in the kitchen and I thought, ‘that is where I'm meant to go’.
“To feel this as a healthy person visiting a Maggie’s Centre seemed absurd and was uncomfortable to me, but it offered at least a glimpse of the monumental emotional implications faced by those who turn to the centres for support.”
This moment of ‘entering in’ to a different sort of space became Paterson’s guiding principle as he set about visiting all seven Scottish Maggie’s Centres and creating new artwork for each one.
Although he describes himself as a painter, Paterson, has an abiding interest in post-war modernism and architectural forms. The ways in which we human beings relate to and navigate our way around our built environment has been a continual source of inspiration to him since his time spent studying painting and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s.
One of the Glasgow-based artist’s best-known works is a colourful ten metre high, 20 metre long steel and fibreglass sculpture outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters at Pacific Quay in Glasgow.
Thresholds, which throws open its doors at The Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from today for a month, presents all seven new sculptural works alongside memory drawings and models by Paterson.
The exhibition, part of this month’s Edinburgh Art Festival, gives the public the opportunity to see the work and the thinking behind it, before it takes it heads to Maggie’s Centres in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness and Airdrie.
The work will also feature during a charity Culture Crawl; a ten mile night hike around Edinburgh’s artistic hotspots on Friday 25 September.
All seven Maggie’s Centres have been designed by top architects, with ‘starchitects’ such as Frank Gehry (Dundee) and Zaha Hadid (Kirkcaldy) waving their fee to play their part in realising the concept dreamed up by their friends, Charles and Maggie Jencks.
Good design and being surrounded by art mattered to Maggie Keswick-Jencks. Before she died at the age of just 52 from cancer, Keswick-Jencks dreamed up the original idea of an holistic, non-clinical centre to which people suffering from cancer could drop into as and when they so desired.
In the days and weeks leading up to her death in July 1995, she had just completed a blueprint for a centre she had in her mind’s eye.
Spurred on by dismay at her own experience in NHS ‘factories of health’ she stated the key to an effective cancer care centre was a homely, welcoming environment that allowed people affected by cancer to drop in unannounced and feel unthreatened.
The heart of it all, she declared, should be a kitchen table to which people could gravitate the moment they entered the building.
The first Maggie’s, designed by Richard Murphy Architects, opened in 1996. It is sited in an old stable block in the grounds of the Western General in Edinburgh.
Both Paterson and Winter were drawn to develop the project through their personal and professional interest in the founding ethos of Maggie’s Centres.

Winter says: “The arts have the power to transform: to tell stories and make connections in a very special way. This is why art, architecture and design play such an important role at Maggie's, whose centres are places about community, people and hope”.
The Paterson artworks join a growing collection of art and sculpture in a variety of mediums, mostly donated or lent by generous artists and placed in Maggie’s Centres throughout the UK. This includes work by Eduardo Paolozzi, Antony Gormley, Callum Innes, Roy Lichenstein and Grayson Perry.
An In-Conversation event with Toby Paterson and Judith Winter will be held at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 3-4pm on 8 August

Thresholds, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Bill Scott Sculpture Centre, 21 Hawthornvale, Edinburgh EH6 4JT, 0131 551 4490, www.edinburghsculpture.org. Until 30 Aug (Open Monday – Saturday, 11am to 5pm each day)