Students help brighten St Mary’s Surgery

At Solent, we are always excited to see our students share their talents within our local community; and a recent collaborative project with a local doctors’ surgery provided a great opportunity to do just that.

Earlier this year, our neighbours, St Mary’s Surgery, invited our BA (Hons) Photography and BA (Hons) Fine Art students to submit pieces of their work for a community project.

Students were given the brief: “Brightening up St Mary’s Surgery: St Mary’s community through the eye of Solent students”, and artwork from both Talha Khan and Allison Caddell is now on display in the surgery’s reception area.

Allison Caddell, Solent University second-year BA (Hons) Fine Art student, says: “My inspiration for the piece came from the St Mary’s community. I spent the morning walking around the area and took photographs of the interesting and well-loved buildings I saw.

“I appreciate that many people who use the surgery might not have English as their first language and wanted to depict familiar images of the area that would be easy to recognise.

“I used colours that were predominant in the area - grey, red and blue seemed to pop up everywhere, and again I wanted to give a sense of familiarity and community, especially in a surgery where visitors might be needing comfort and reassurance.”

Talha Khan, second-year BA (Hons) Photography student added: “I saw an image by one of my mentors from Pakistan, he took an image of a sunset in a desert somewhere in Saudi Arabia and I really wanted to created something similar to that in Southampton.

“My image was taken in Southampton near the docks in Mayflower Park. This particular image is actually from a series that I took in first year for our final exhibition. As the image shows the ending of a day, and starting of a night, we can hope for another beautiful day after the night, and this could be something well suited for the surgery, spreading the message of good hope.

“Since I started photography, I have always had a wish of making people smile with my work. I’m really happy and honoured that I got a chance to share my passion about something that I love and that other people will get to see my work.”

Kim Toyn, Nurse Practitioner at St Mary’s Surgery added: “On average, 3,000 people pass through the doors of St Marys Surgery every week, many of them needing to wait for appointments in the reception room. Even just waiting for a minute can seem an age when you are feeling poorly, so we are keen to promote a positive and engaging experience in our waiting area.

“We were very pleased to forge collaborative links with Solent University’s art and photography students and are delighted to exhibit some art work which  relates to the general community of St Mary’s and can provide  some creative distraction for our diverse community of patients.”