Foundation Art and Public Space
Cor Dera
Dorestad nursing home
photo: Gert Jan van Rooijen
artist:
Dera
located in:
Verpleeghuis Dorestad
,
client:
Verpleeghuis Dorestad
The art project that was created for Verpleeghuis Dorestad, a nursing home that mainly houses psychogeriatric patients, is made up of two components. In the meeting place, Cor Dera created a long horizontal light box featuring six enlarged butterflies. Each insect belongs to a species that the nursing home’s residents could encounter in the nearby dunes of The Hague. The second component consists of a variety of butterfly images that are set in enameled plates and hang near the entrance to the residential units.
Cor Dera’s work seeks to offer the residents a moment of astounding beauty that temporarily lifts them out of the hazy darkness in which they mentally find themselves. In so doing, he taps into the appreciation of beauty, one of the few remaining emotions that connects the psychogeriatric patient to the familiar. The fact that the concepts contained in Dera’s work extend beyond the simple depiction of natural beauty, is probably no longer relevant to some of the patients in the nursing home. However, the butterflies can potentially become a familiar friend and a point of orientation in their dazed universe.
