This pair of images depicting Linda Lupton, a supervisor at the huge laundry at the Royal Infirmary of Edinbugh is one of a series entitled Havens: Stories and Portraits from NHS Lothian. The series was created during a residency with the National Health Service in the Lothians region of south-eastern Scotland, in and around the capital Edinburgh, between 2022 and 2025, commissioned by Tonic Arts, part of NHS Lothian Charity.
NHS Lothian has a budget of £1.6 billion and serves a population of over 900,000, employing a staff of approximately 26,000. Focussing on staff wellbeing, we photographed and interviewed with over seventy individual staff members in various locations including hospitals, GP surgeries, outpatient clinics, psychiatric facilities and children’s services, parks and gardens, laboratories, storerooms and kitchens.
The resulting series of diptych artworks (portraits taken by Craig Easton, and detail/location images with text by Lottie Davies) explores the working lives of staff in the National Health Service in Scotland, and their own mental health needs in response to daily experience delivering healthcare to the nation. We hope that the work demonstrates the tenacity and resilience of laundry workers, painters and porters as well as doctors, nurses and therapists, all essential members of the NHS working family.
Linda and her team are responsible for the linen supply for the three hospitals on site. They are based in the basement of the Infirmary far beneath the wards, in a warren of concrete corridors, interconnected rooms and clattering machines. The text you can see on the right hand image is transcribed from an interview with Linda, and says "I’m supposed to start at six and I’m in at the back of five every morning and I start right away. I just started off as an assistant and then now I am a supervisor and I actually run the Royal Infirmary and the Sick Kids in Edinburgh. Because we’re in the basement and there’s no windows or anything like that, every now and again I’ll mebbe say we’ll go up for five minutes and go outside, have a walk frae one end of the hospital to the other. If we’re actually here in the linen room for any length of time we’re laughing and joking and things like that, I mean, we try and keep the morale up as much as we can. When break time comes - usually lunchtime, we go outside and have our lunch. Or we have lunch here and then we go outside for a walk or just stand and have a blether with other people like the domestics, the nurses, the porters, anybody. And usually, at the end of the day we mebbe have a wee chat about things that’s went on round about.” You can hear Linda's full interview here.
To see the full series and listen to people from all departments across the Lothians, go to the Havens section of the Tonic Arts website, where you can also see behind-the-scenes snaps of Lottie and Craig working on the project. You can also watch a short film by Rob Brady about the making of the project, and read a piece of creative non-fiction written by Lottie and published by Tonic Arts.
See more work by Davies | Easton
