A blog post from Dr Jimmy Turner, Research Fellow of the Binks Hub.
In this post I would like to introduce you to one of the oldest – and slowest – projects that the Binks Hub has undertaken: Recycling a Hospital.
It began in late 2021, shortly after I joined the Binks Hub at the University of Edinburgh. One of the first meetings I attended was with new colleagues Ingrid Heersche and Patricia Erskine about the then ongoing renovations to transform the Old Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh hospital on Lauriston Place into the new Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI).
I was both heartened and impressed to hear from them just how central community engagement was to the overall vision for the EFI. They expressed that retaining the publicness of the building and ensuring that it was a resource for the wider community were a real priority. I was also glad to hear, with the climate crisis in mind, that there was a commitment to reusing and recycling as much of the original material of the hospital as possible.
I was left, however, with the notion that we could go even further. What would a more material form of engagement with publicness look like, that was also inclusive of the very spirit and body of publicness? The challenge in this is considerable. NHS hospitals might perhaps be the most ‘public’ of buildings that we have in the UK, so how can academics who go on to occupy them ever truly and fully continue to engage with the visceral publicness that inhabits them?
From these thoughts an idea emerged – the harebrained scheme to construct an artwork from the otherwise unusable and unrecyclable materials being pulled from the old hospital building. In doing so, I suggested, we might find a way to engage with the spirits of the people who were born, died, recovered, worked and, in myriad other ways, existed within this building in its previous life.
Colleagues in the EFI were enthusiastic about the idea and two, Jennifer Williams and Gintare Kulyte, would join me in the Spirit Case team. Together we have spent the last two years developing, designing and making the Spirit Case through an interdisciplinary arts project that connects woodworking, poetry, stone carving, ceremony and photography, and aims to honour the Old Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and the memories connected to it.

With the outline of a plan, in the spring of 2022 I was able to visit the building for the first time. At that stage it was a busy, bustling, and, for me, bafflingly complex building site. I gathered together a variety of interesting pieces from the original hospital build including some large pine floor joists and locally-quarried roof slates. These would be the materials we would contend with in our efforts to craft an artwork that would speak to both the physical and symbolic transformation of the building.
We spent the next year slowly developing partnerships with the organisations and people who would help us realise our vision. For the woodworking part of the project, which was my focus, we teamed up with the woodworking programme at the Grassmarket Community Project. For the poetic and photographic memory work that Jennifer and Gintare led on, the key collaborators would be the Pelican Nurses League, a society for nurses who trained in the Royal when it was a teaching hospital. In order to incorporate their poetry into the piece, we needed to find an artist who works with slate, and were delighted to discover and partner with Gus Fisher, a Peebles-based stone and lettering artist.
Together we developed a design for the Spirit Case and a plan for how we could realise it.

The making then began in the summer of 2023, spread across four different artistic practices, starting with woodworking. Through the months of July and August 2023 I spent my accumulated annual leave in the workshop down at the Grassmarket, working alongside their staff, volunteers and trainees to turn 150-year-old rough pine joints and some elm wood from the site into a cabinet on a stand. I have written at length about this process on our project blog, so here I will just say that it was one of the great pleasures of my life to have spent so much time with the women and men who make that workshop such a magical place.
Shortly after the woodworking began, the poetry and photography projects also kicked into gear. Jennifer ran three poetry workshops; the first with members of the Pelican Nurses League, a second which was open to members of the local community who had connections to the hospital, and a third open to students of the new EFI building.

At these workshops Jennifer led participants through a series of poetry-writing exercises, drawing on objects that some had brought to represent their memories. Gintare also used these sessions to begin the photography aspect of the project, which combines people, objects and memories in a series of portraits within the EFI building. This will launch with an event in the autumn of 2024. At the end of the workshops Jennifer collected together key words and concepts from the participants and used these to craft a pair of poems. These words were then carved into the slate and stone that Gus would connect to the wooden structure made at the Grassmarket.
The day that he came to collect the wooden structure was a bittersweet one for me. It was by now September and I felt pride and happiness in what we had achieved, but this was leavened by a sadness that my practical collaboration with the folk in the workshop was largely complete.

A period of intense activity for me had come to an end, and as the new academic year started, most of the ongoing work shifted to Gus’ studio. Although the physical making was being done in Peebles, the collaborative nature was as strong as ever. We worked together to ensure that the poems Jennifer had co-created with our workshop participants were at home on the slates, and that these could co-exist harmoniously with the wooden structure. We also gained a new team member, Ekaterina Shurkova, who is an expert in ritual and ceremony and began working with us to design an event at which we could launch the Spirit Case into the world.


Finally, nearly two-and-a-half years after the project emerged from a largely administrative Teams meeting, we were able to deliver the Spirit Case to its new home in the EFI building in late May 2024.



The big question that remains for us is whether the Spirit of Publicness which we built the Spirit Case to house will indeed continue its residence in the building? The answer to this question will depend on our colleagues in the EFI, and based on the feedback we have received from them up to now, we have hope.

Image Credits: Jimmy Turner, Gintare Kulyte, Ekaterina Shurkova, Chris Scott.
If you would like to learn more about the Spirit Case and its journey, read on at:
Recycling a Hospital (ed.ac.uk)
The Spirit Case – Edinburgh Futures Institute