Cork 2005: One part of "Encounters", the artist-in-residence programme, was winding down at St Finbarr's Hospital last week. This was a Triskel initiative devised with Glasgow artist Charlotte Donovan as part of the year's Culture and Health strand, and uniting artists, staff and patients in a creative engagement which will continue in some areas into 2006.

The vast hospital once incorporated the city's workhouse, and its complex of buildings includes the former laundry soon to become a kitchen. Said to have been run as a Magdalene operation, it is now largely an abandoned space, storing unwanted steel beds and hoists. Here Donovan assembled a locker-room of staff uniforms as part of an installation including retrieved laundry lists, machinery maps and manuals, and report and account books.

The Encounter project has separate strands, employing different local and visiting artists: a two-week student residency was organised by Trish Edelstein of Boomerang, a sound works programme was developed for the Arts Trail, and drawing and painting sessions were held with patients and incorporated into installations.

A music student produced a CD from a Community Music course based in the hospital; there were workshops, monthly film screenings, the use of a hospital day-room as an artist's studio for staff and patients, and a bleak courtyard was transformed by a mural (by Edinburgh-based AJP Public Arts) portraying European cultural landmarks.

These, with a garden party on September 25th in the hospital grounds on the feast of St Finbarr, are all aspects of a programme which includes a photographic and narrative exhibition based on a collaboration between Triskel's Penny Rae and photographer Carl Cordonnier planned for October.

A further residency will unite the city's two remaining maternity hospitals, the beloved unit at Finbarr's and the more modern one at Erinville, before they are absorbed into the new department at Cork University Hospital.

Now the artists are leaving the old laundry, bringing with them the "wishing wall" designed by Patricia Hurl and Thierry Rudin. Created by some of the long-stay patients, this is a composition of discarded bed-sheets which were torn and knotted into a screen which thickens with each added layer. Some of the linen was trapped in embroidery frames so that the threads were teased out to make a pattern.

Nothing can reflect the diversity of lives and events over more than a century in this great hospital, but at least the Encounter project, supported by the southern area of the Health Service Executive, acknowledges its human history.