Working, caring, recovering, reflecting.

Throughout 2021 photographer Catharine Neilson was commissioned by NSW Health Infrastructure to photographed the Maitland Hospital at work during its last year on the High Street site. Her photographs include portraits of staff, volunteers and patients. They are portraits but they are also more than portraits. As a body of work they capture a variety of moments and experiences within the hospital.

For one of her artworks for the the exhibition A Conspicuous Object - The Maitland Hospital at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery she selected a small number of her photographs to convey a sense of the diversity and range of work and people that make the hospital function.

**Catharine Neilson’s *Working, caring, recovering, reflecting* installed in the exhibition, October 2021.**
(Clare Hodgins)

“My work as a photographer over the past year has been to capture Maitland Hospital as it is now, at the end of a significant chapter in its life. What I’ve learned is that it is full of hardworking, caring, funny and interesting people: nurses, doctors, cleaners, catering staff, administrators, pathologists, therapists, volunteers and many more. There are also the patients. For them the hospital has entered their lives, through births and deaths and everything in between. For me, more than a collection of buildings, the Maitland Hospital is a collection of people. My photographs aim to provide glimpses of the hospital’s people working, caring, recovering, reflecting.”

— Catharine Neilson, 2021

All the photographs in the exhibition were eco solvent pigment prints on archival cotton rag paper.

They were printed in four different sizes: 5 x 7”, 8 x 10”, 9 x 12” and 11 x 15”. They are grouped by these sizes below.

Click on the images to get a bigger view of the images and a slide show of each group. Hover over the bottom of each image in the slide shows to see Catharine’s extended captions for some of her photographs.

5 x 7”