A new architectural commission by ceramicist Will Levi Marshall will give visitors to the Oncology Unit at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary a chance to step back in time.

'The Cairt Freeze' is a cartographically inspired work tracing the previous locations of Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary. The Infirmary was opened in November 1776 just off St Michael’s Street. In May 1873 it moved to its Nithbank location, before moving to its current site in 1974.  In the Scots language the word Cairt means a chart or map: a geographical survey.

Will won the commission with a proposal based on an investigation into three concepts:

Location:   The hospital and its sites in Dumfries
Time:         The old and the new, regeneration, change, flux
Scale:        Large/small, the big picture and detailed examination

The design was created by digitally enlarging a 1961 coloured Ordnance Survey map until it broke up into tiles of individually coloured pixels.

The main graphic features of this image, the road, the river Nith and the Infirmary itself, are picked out in hand glazed porcelain tiles. Textures and definition are then built up by overlaying the coloured tiles with gold lustre and enamel transfers of the 1819 John Wood map of Dumfries. This exploits scale to create a layering of the historical locations of the Infirmary within the hospitals current site. 

“The core concepts, location, time and scale, have been extrapolated and applied to create a dynamic design which invigorates the existing architecture as well as integrating with it," explains Marshall.

"The work is not ‘framed’ in the traditional sense and the loose ‘edge’ is finished flush with the fabric of the building.”

Will, who is based in Castle Douglas, trained at Manchester Metropolitan University before completing a Master of Fine Arts (Ceramics) at New York State College of Ceramics in New York, USA.