Tesselated

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 2s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Geometric tessellated tiles cover the floor in a grid of interlocking shapes. Dust and grime have settled into the grout lines. The pattern is largely intact. The room is silent, with no furniture or fittings visible. Natural light falls across the surface, picking out the texture of individual tiles.

Edition

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Tesselated
Series: Lewisham Hospital
Catalogue: LHO-023
Process: Giclée
Captured: 28 January 2019
Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 2s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 14 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Lewisham, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Lewisham, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

Inside the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds, a tessellated tile floor holds its pattern against decades of neglect. The geometric shapes interlock across the room in a design that was once an everyday feature of the building, the kind of finish that institutional construction of the late Victorian period brought to floors that needed to be durable, cleanable, and permanent. Whatever surrounded the floor, furniture, fittings, the daily movement of people, is long gone. The tiles remain. The Lewisham complex grew across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927, each marked by a foundation stone. The Little Company of Mary, a nursing order founded in Nottingham in 1877, opened the first hospital wing on 9 June 1889, following the arrival of six sisters in Sydney four years earlier with five pounds between them. What began as a children's hospital expanded into a general hospital from 1912. At its mid-century peak, the hospital treated 3,600 in-patients in a single year and recorded 88,399 out-patient attendances. Between 1890 and 1948, cumulative totals reached 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 out-patients. The novitiate building, the principal subject of the Lost Collective photographic series made in 2019, sits within this complex. It was designed for the interior life of the order: individual contemplation, communal religious practice, and the training of women entering the Little Company of Mary. The cellular layout of the building differs from the open ward architecture of the hospital wings, reflecting a different kind of institution operating on the same site. The Little Company of Mary vacated Lewisham in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987, and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The site was redeveloped for aged care. Most of the complex now serves new purposes. This floor, in a room that has no current function, records what was laid down in an earlier century and never lifted.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A tessellated floor survives inside the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds, its geometric pattern still largely whole beneath the grime of decades. The Little Company of Mary operated the Lewisham complex from 1889 until 1986, building a Catholic hospital and nursing school that treated nearly a million outpatients over the first six decades alone. The order vacated the site in 1986; the hospital formally closed around 1988. What remains of the floor is a detail that outlasted almost everything else.

Brett Patman

The series

Lewisham Hospital

2019 · 26 photographs

Lewisham Hospital was opened on 9 June 1889 by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, on the site where the Little Company of Mary, the Blue Nuns, had established their Sydney convent in 1887. Originally named the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child, it admitted women and children only until male patients were accepted from 1912. Over the following decades it became one of Sydney's main general hospitals and nurse training schools. It closed in 1988, a century of Catholic healthcare on one block of West Street, Lewisham. The Lost Collective photographs are of the novitiate building, the wing where new entrants to the order were trained, which sits within the broader hospital, convent, and grounds complex. The historic complex is listed as a local heritage item under the Inner West LEP (formerly Marrickville LEP 2011), within the Lewisham North Precinct. The convent chapel, in a revival Byzantine style with a 1927 Möller pipe organ, still stands on the site.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

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