2008 Winner - Jeremy Hutchison

Jeremy Hutchison is a digital artist whose work includes websites, large-scale installations and performances with a strong emphasis on widespread participation.

His residency in 2008 is based at the Young People's Unit in the Cancer Centre at University Hospital Birmingham. This is the major specialist cancer centre in the West Midlands. Teenagers who are treated on the unit can be suffering from a range of different types of cancer. Treatment is intensive and hard. Patients are generally having chemotherapy every 3 weeks, and are usually in hospital for at least two nights and often a full week.

Jeremy worked with the teenagers to create an interactive website. They made their own personal contributions via the creation of a personal ribbon, drawing on their experience of being in hospital.

Joe Gilligan

This is a timescale of my time at the you.
Uncertainty soon fades away but lingers at the "end" but normality kicks in as time progresses.

Geoff Smallman

The green represents my environmental science.
The blue represents my cycles of chemotherapy.
The purple represents infections along the way.
The yellow shows my period of good health again.

The ribbons were brought together to create an overall "Hero Ribbon" to illustrate the collective experience of the group.

Jeremy also created a second installation to mark the residency. The hero ribbons were placed on different medical containers - the story of each individual being placed inside each one.

"University Hospital is full of personal stories of adversity, courage and victory. I propose to create a process whereby these experiences can be shared and honoured, where patients can translate their own stories into powerful, multi-coloured visual symbols.

The colourcodes would build up over the residency, the site being accessible to patients and staff and will be collated together to form a Hero ribbon - an ever-evolving digital fabric full of intricate textures and colours."
Jeremy Hutchison.