Hospital Linen

"From 1992 - 1995 my studio was located in a disused ward for the elderly at the Hackney Hospital in the East End of London. The building had a previous life as a workhouse from 1729 - 1929 [...]. Within a few weeks of my arrival the laundry attached to the hospital closed [...]. I became obsessed with the hospital's derelict interior. I focused my efforts on documenting the laundry and the metaphors of meaning that could potentially be revealed. I photographed this deserted industrial-sized space, with its broken equipment and discarded heaps of bedding, to evoke a more personal poetics of loss. My photographs [...] act as reminders of a community of (invisible) women's labour. The illuminated and visible moments of a community slipping away is intensified by the material evidence of the overlooked detritus of the everyday: laundry bundles, discarded cloth, rags, and abandoned nurses' uniforms."

Janis Jefferies, Laboured Cloth
in: Livingstone, Joan & Ploof, John (eds) (2007), The Object of `Labor: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production, Achool of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, pp. 285, 286