Franoise Dupr's residency is being managed by Paintings in Hospitals, a registered charity founded in 1959 to provide original works of art to hospitals, hospices and other healthcare settings across the UK.

In 2005, with support from the Max Reinhardt Charitable Trust, Paintings in Hospitals launched the Alexandra Reinhardt Memorial Award. This is an annual artist-in-residence project, that will be based at a different NHS Hospital each year, for five years, at no cost to the hospital. This year's project is being hosted by the Feto-Maternal Medicine Department at The John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. The unit cares for mothers who are themselves unwell and those whose babies who require intervention or surgery.

A sculptor by training, Dupr enjoys working in settings not normally associated with the making of art works. In the Feto-Maternal Medicine Department she has been encouraging inpatients and outpatients, their families and staff to join her in French (spool) knitting. Spool knitting is a simple and straightforward way of knitting yarns, strings and other materials into pliant woolly lengths. It is these woolly lengths in bright vibrant colours that are being used to make the final artworks. Their flexibility allows them to be sculpted and moulded into a range of shapes.

The photograph shows Dupr with some of these shapes mounted on plain white paper, on which she has sketched and painted colourful images. Magnified slides of parts of the human body, inform the shapes she sculpts. The sculpted shapes then inform further painted images, an iterative process that creates a visible journey towards the final piece. The journey is taking place on the wall where the finished work will hang.

It is still too early in the process for the piece to have a title or a definite final shape as the work is not due to be completed until the end of December. What is clearly visible is that Dupr and those in the unit who are knitting with her are in the process of creating a stunning tactile piece with its origins in medical imagery and its direction of travel towards a celebration of creativity.