Life’s a Waiting Room, Installation, 2025.

Life’s a Waiting Room clinic
Installation, Images from The Local, 2025.

Time passes differently in the waiting room, for caregivers and for everyone who needs medical care. For caregivers, it moves in tandem with another person’s time. It is witnessing, and being present for another.

In medical waiting rooms, this time is often spent in advocacy and support. Caregivers take notes, ask questions, remember details and record information that might otherwise be lost. The waiting room becomes a space where care is performed, not through action alone, but through attention, observation and responsibility.

Sitting in a waiting room, whether as a patient or a carer, we often project ourselves into an imagined future: a diagnosis, a treatment plan, certainty, reassurance. Instead, we are held in possibility and uncertainty. We wait with hope, anxiety, anticipation and fear, thinking not today, but perhaps tomorrow.

Waiting is not passive for anyone in this space. For those receiving care, it is time lived inside uncertainty about their own bodies. For caregivers, it is the work of being present for another person while navigating that uncertainty. The waiting room is where this labour becomes visible.

Read my article on Life’s a Waiting Room at The Conversation.