Tom Pearman was commissioned to create a series of 12 glass artworks for Broomfield Hospital in Essex.
Installed across designated areas of the hospital, the works explore the surrounding Essex landscape through a combination of layered imagery, transparent and opaque surfaces, colour and precisely cut glass.
Rather than presenting conventional landscape scenes, the project breaks each image into separate components, allowing fragments of the same landscape to appear at different locations throughout the building.
Essex landscape
The imagery developed from Tom’s observations of the Essex landscape and, in particular, the experience of seeing car headlights travelling across the horizon at night.
The intense beams of light create large geometric shapes that momentarily cut across the darkness, transforming familiar trees, fields, buildings and suburban landscapes into something more abstract and cinematic.
This contrast between recognisable landscape and artificial light became a recurring visual device within the artworks.
Movie matte painting
The project was also influenced by the traditional film technique of matte painting.
Historically, filmmakers painted additional scenery or architectural elements onto sheets of glass, positioning them between the camera and the physical set to create the illusion of a much larger or different environment.
Tom adapted this principle by constructing each landscape from a number of visual layers. Foreground, background and individual elements are separated across different glass surfaces, creating compositions that appear to shift between physical depth and flat graphic imagery.
Fragmented landscapes
Each image was divided into three related versions:
- a combination of custom laminated and screen-printed fired glass
- a laminated image
- a fired-glass image
These components were distributed through different areas of the hospital rather than displayed together.
The viewer therefore encounters fragments of the compositions while moving through the building and is invited to make connections between them — gradually assembling the “full picture” through memory and movement.
Layers and materials
The works combine several fabrication processes to create differences in depth, transparency and surface.
Custom laminated elements introduce coloured and layered forms, while screen-printed fired enamels create permanent imagery directly within the glass.
Some elements physically project from the surface, reinforcing the relationship between foreground and background and giving the artworks a shallow sculptural quality.
Digital fabrication
The individual artworks were produced as bespoke shaped glass panels rather than conventional rectangles.
Tom developed the forms digitally and supplied DXF cutting files, allowing the glass to be accurately cut using waterjet technology.
This process enabled the external shape of each artwork to become part of the composition, with the outline responding directly to the landscape imagery contained within it.
Art within the hospital
The series was conceived to be encountered gradually as people move through the hospital.
Individual fragments may initially appear as independent abstract landscapes, but repeated colours, shapes and forms establish relationships between works located elsewhere in the building.
The project uses this dispersed structure to turn movement through the hospital into part of the experience of the artwork.
