Media Release

Healing Threads woven for The Royal Melbourne Hospital

26 September 2007

The cutting-off ceremony for the much-anticipated Royal Melbourne Hospital Tapestry – Healing Threads was held tonight at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop in South Melbourne.

Guest speaker was Sir Gustav Nossal AC CBE, who also had the honour – along with artist Merrin Eirth – of cutting the tapestry from the loom.

Healing Threads is a collaboration between RMH, Victorian College of the Arts and Victorian Tapestry Workshop. Ms Eirth, Head of Drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Merrin spent 12 weeks as Artist in Residence across both RMH campuses to engage with patients, staff and visitors about their experience of the hospital. From this, at a studio set up at Park House on RMH Royal Park Campus, she developed the design for a 4 metre by 2 metre tapestry.

Her contemporary design - Research and respond, reflects the life and tradition of RMH, and was created over seven months by weavers Chris Cochius, Louise King, Rebecca Moulton and Emma Sulzer at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop. It will be displayed in the new front foyer of the hospital in mid-2008.

The challenge for the weavers involved devising a suitable interpretation of the background – a regular graphic quality as well as a subtle and gentle flow from one colour to another needed to be maintained.

The tapestry was made possible with the support of the Baillieu and Sarah Myer Family Foundation, the Helen MacPherson Smith Trust, Mrs Barbara Haynes and private philanthropic donations.

This is the second work to be commissioned for the Delacombe Tapestry Project, a funding initiative set up by the Tapestry Foundation of Victoria as a tribute to Lady Delacombe. The Delacombe Tapestry series comprises large site-specific tapestries by contemporary artists in regional and metropolitan health institutions within Victoria.

Sir Gustav Nossal and artist Merrin Eirth cut the tapestry off the loom in the traditional cutting off ceremony.