‘Everything’s going to be fine’

Matthew Monahan in the Rijnlands Rehabilitation Centre in Leiden

In the former Zeehospitum, in the dunes near Katwijk, live children with a serious physical handicap. During the day a number of them go to school in Leiden. A short time ago a rehabilitation centre was built next to the school which they can attend after schooltime. The centre includes rooms for various sorts of therapy as well as an outpatients’ clinic and accommodation for short-term admissions. The sports facilities are rented to local sports clubs in the evenings.
The architecture of the new centre, designed by Harry Sipkens of Groosman Partners, has a clear structure. A long, straight wall forms the building’s backbone and all the therapy rooms, as well as the patios, hook up with it. The wall borders a long corridor linking the different spaces. The architect gave the wall, which is perforated in many places by windows and doors, a bright blue colour so that it remains recognisable as a powerful gesture, both in the interior as well as from the outside via the glass facade.
It soon became clear that this wall would be the most attractive spot for an art project. Not unreasonably, however, the architect was afraid that placing a work of art at this very spot would disturb the harmony of the architectural concept. This made it an interesting challenge for art.

Inquiring
The choice fell quite soon on the American artist Matthew Monahan because of his subtle and inquiring way of working. Monahan is an artist who uses drawing to investigate how things fit together. His idea was to depict what takes place in the clinic and how the children struggle to live with their physical imperfections. He wanted to make the drawings for the children themselves, but also for the sportsmen who use the building in the evening, so that they could see what happens there during the day.
Monahan works autonomously as an artist and this was his first applied work. He was immediately fascinated by the quality of the architecture, a quality that one seldom encounters in health departments in America, and by everything that went on here.
During a recent stay in China he had made work on rolls of Chinese rice paper. The transparency of the paper on which he drew created a fascinating stratification, and he wanted to use these qualities in the work he would make for Leiden. He made endless amounts of drawings in blue pencil, the same colour as the wall, of all the things that went on in the centre. Sometimes he folded drawings in two, other times he played with the transparent nature of the paper. The drawings were scanned at high resolution so that no details were lost and then printed onto strips of vinyl. The strips were then cut precisely to size and mounted onto the walls between the doorways, so that it looks like a seamless, continual drawing, interrupted only by the entrance doors and the windows. Monahan used all sorts of details from the architecture and the activities of the centre’s users for the drawings. We see swimmers, swimming pool tiles, training equipment from the gym, architectural details and even paving or pebbles from the path or the bridge where children practice their locomotion. There is an enormous amount to see in the drawings, which can be experienced and studied not only by wheelchair users but also at eye level. Six original drawings have been separately framed and hang throughout the building.
If the blue wall forms the building’s backbone then the work of art is its nervous system. The work reinforces the architecture and makes the building’s function legible. It provides insight into the lives of the children who come here daily. The initial fear that the work of art would disturb the architecture has turned out to be completely unfounded in all respects.

Liesbeth Melis & Rob van de Ven