Ellen Hyllemose. Photo by Frida Gregersen

Hanging figurine, The Heart of the House, 2025

"The display cases are full of everyday things that are often invisible to us or that we don't give much thought to.”

The display cases are built around colours and forms that echo the hanging sculpture, the artworks, and the tables throughout the café and entrance areas. They are intended to create a dialogue with the suspended piece, reflecting the processes found in the body's langerhans’ islands.

from Ellen Hyllemose’s website

"The [hospital] has a great importance for those who will use the place. So I wanted to add something that has a different character than you would expect in a hospital. Since I can't put artworks on the floor or on the wall like in a gallery, I have to find another way to get something different into the house in other materials. That's why I made the sculpture display cases, which allow me to have something "different" that patients and others can look at while they wait. Pictures can hang anywhere since they are framed, but I wanted you to see art when you entered the house.

Ellen Hyllemose, May 2026

The sculpture display cases

Ellen Hyllemose explains that her process began with freely exploring ideas in response to both the space and its surroundings before gradually focusing on the specific context. Often, she works from little more than the architect's drawings and visualisations.

“The floor was the first thing I thought of, as it had a large empty surface in a slightly low-ceilinged room and with an opening to the atrium, where you could look down on the surface […] There was also a desire to work with the outdoors as well and I could do that with the covering.”

The idea in the floor and walls is that the areas outside and inside come together. When you enter the area with the stone fields, you are on the islands and you know you are in the Diabetes Center. The fields create peace and intimacy where you sit in the atrium, as a function of rugs in the home and here as the islands, where the relevant outpatient diabetes functions take place. 
With individual painted fields on walls, where there are no floor fields, the connection and the change between horizontal and vertical, inside and outside, are marked and make you notice the fields. The fields are hand-painted in a lively way, so that they relate to the stone in the floor surface.

Another thing Ellen Hyllemose wanted, was to make something everyone could see, not just those on the ground floor, but something that could be seen in the atrium space over several floors.

The work as a whole represents a landscape-oriented and poetic interplay between added functions and materials, forms and meanings. The building acts as a body, a biological entity defined by circadian rhythms and sensory experience, governed by physical activity and the intake of nourishment, much like our own bodies.

Whether one is a patient or simply an ordinary person, circadian rhythms and the experience of the senses and the unexpected are vital to well-being. This is embodied in the The Heart of the House hanging figure with its LED lighting marking the building's rhythm.

The Heart of the House is a form that encompasses many forms within itself: the heart of the building, a receptor, a different kind of timekeeper, and so on.