The Maitland Hospital has served its local community in the lower Hunter in NSW for over 175 years. Located on its site in High St, Maitland, since the late 1840s, it moved to a new facility on a new site at Metford in January 2022.
As part of the transition from the old to the new site, and as an acknowledgement of the important role that Maitland Hospital has played and plays in the local community, the Collected Memory Project was initiated as a partnership between Hunter New England Local Health District (HNELHD), Health Infrastructure (HI) and Maitland City Council.
The main objective of Collected Memory was to realise a variety of art and heritage items in public spaces in the new Maitland Hospital. A key purpose was to connect the old Maitland Hospital and the Maitland community more broadly to the new Maitland Hospital through items in the Maitland Hospital Collection, artworks, images, stories and other creative forms.
The exhibition, A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital was hosted by the Maitland Regional Art Gallery as a companion to the Collected Memory Project. It documented and shared stories about the hospital, and invited ten artists to respond to some of those stories and to the messages and themes that emerge from them.
This website was developed in late 2020 and early 2021 and published in April 2021 as a way to collect and share research and stories about the history of the Maitland Hospital. The aims were to provide material and insights that could inform the creative responses by the artists for the exhibition, and also to create an innovative online history of the Maitland Hospital. Community members and hospital staff were invited to contribute their memories, family stories and memorabilia. Research on items in the Maitland Hospital Collection was converted into stories that illustrate and at times query aspects of the hospital’s history. Reflective explorations of the work and messages presented by the artists and the exhibition document the various ways in which artists and curators converse with history, offer creative forms of engagement with the past and contribute to the ever-expanding possibilities of public history. The end result is a website that invites viewers to encounter aspects of the history and significance of the Maitland Hospital through browsing and linking stories, and through an immersion in words and images about the site, its places and spaces, its people, its material culture and its stories. The bulk of the stories were published during 2021 and early 2022. Adding and updating, however, will continue.
Website content: Janis Wilton
Website design: February
Exhibition venue: Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG)
Exhibition curators: Joe Eisenberg, Cheryl Farrell, Janis Wilton
Exhibition dates: 16 October 2021 to 6 February 2022
Awards
MAGNA 2022 (Museums and Galleries National Awards)
Highly commended - Interpretation or Learning Initiative Level 2
Judges’ comment: An innovative and powerful way to interpret the history of a hospital through art. The exhibition serves as both interpreter and collector of memory. Using broad community input to drive the project the gallery turns what could have been a dry display about hospital history into a beautiful experience of art and creativity. The collection of community stories serves an important archival goal, and the website, social media, interviews and art and object displays provide multiple avenues for enjoyment.
MAPDA 2022 (Museums Australasia Multimedia and Publication Design Awards)
Highly commended - Program Website Level 1
Judges comment: Content rich site with a relatively intuitive navigation.
Acknowledgements
A Conspicuous Object is made possible through the generous support of
community members and hospital staff who participated by sharing their memories, memorabilia and photographs in and for hospital stories;
the artists who responded creatively to the history of The Maitland Hospital; and
Geoff Ainsworth & Johanna Featherstone, Geoffrey Hassall, and Penelope Seidler who showed faith in A Conspicuous Object through their generous financial support.
