Bill Mould

installed this georgous ceramic by Bill Mould in the Medical Board Room today. It is stunning. I've had a tough time photographing it - this really doesn't do it justice.
I've blogged his artist statement already but it bears repeating.

The Hippocratic Oath

When NIH approached me about commissioning a work for their permanent collection, the choice of subject came to me almost immediately. Most of my work has had a relationship to texts, words, communication. I have often tried to evoke documents from antiquity, hinting at lost languages, hidden meanings. Using only ceramic clay, my goal is not to directly imitate a substance or texture, but to evoke it.It was natural to choose the Hippocratic Oath as the focus of a piece of art. The choice led to a number of surprises. Having determined to use the Oath in its original Greek, I began to search for the text.I was stunned to discover that the original text is long lost -- no one even seems sure of when it faded from sight. Many medical schools devise their own version of the Oath, fitting it to the particular needs of the institution.I was finally able to track down a reconstruction of the original Greek Oath. Opening with an invocation to Apollo, the patron deity of medicine, it enumerates a number of standards and practices for the physician to observe. Studying the Greek writing and its meaning led to another discovery. Nowhere in the lengthy text is the phrase "First, do no harm" to be found. Not only had the original text disappeared, but the closest thing we have does not contain the most famous words attributed to the Oath.The materials I suggest -- metal, leather, and parchment/papyrus -- have all been used to transcribe and immortalize the Oath.. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the near past, all strive for permanence. But the surfaces evoked are subject to decay and destruction, as was the text itself. Yet despite the ravages of time and Nature, the essence of the Hippocratic Oath lives on as the moral and spiritual foundation of the medical profession.