For Cowra artist Jayarna Cook, seeing her brightly coloured paintings hanging inside the town’s new hospital carries a particularly personal meaning.

It is the hospital where she welcomed her own children into the world, in the community whose landscapes continually inspire her work, and now a place where her art can bring colour and happiness to patients and families during difficult days.

Ms Cook is among the local and regionally connected artists whose work has been selected for the new Cowra Hospital as part of the $114.3 million redevelopment.

More than 30 newly commissioned artworks, spanning painting, photography, collage and sculpture, have been incorporated throughout the facility, but Ms Cook’s pieces are unmistakably local.

Rolling hills, sheep, cockatoos, the Lachlan River and familiar pieces of the Cowra countryside are transformed through her distinctive use of bold, joyful colour.

“I like bright colours as, they fee like joy,” Ms Cook said.

“I want people to feel happy when they look at my art.”

Her inspiration often begins not in the studio, but during ordinary moments spent with her family.

Drives through the countryside become opportunities to notice colours, animals and landscapes that may later find their way onto a canvas.

“When I go for drives, my family and I, we just drive around the countryside, and sometimes I take photos of certain things,” she said.

“Sometimes I just keep it in my brain, and then I incorporate things I’ve seen into my paintings in a kind of abstract way.”

Another recurring subject is the Lachlan River and the cockatoos Ms Cook encounters while walking with her family.

“When we walked along the river, down on the path under the bridge, there’s cockies everywhere,” she said.

“I paint the cockies and the river quite often.

"I just always come back to that because that’s my walk with my family.”

That local familiarity is something Ms Cook hopes will make the paintings particularly meaningful inside the hospital.

Someone passing a piece in a corridor may recognise an animal, landscape or scene resembling somewhere they have walked or driven themselves, while the bright colours are intended to lift the mood.

For Ms Cook, painting provides much the same sense of comfort she hopes her work can now offer others.

“It’s my therapy,” she said.

Her involvement in the hospital collection began through an Expression of Interest process for artists living locally or with a strong connection to Cowra and the surrounding region.

Applicants were asked to demonstrate that connection and provide examples of their work before pieces were selected.

The resulting collection was developed with curatorial support from Arts OutWest, Cowra Regional Art Gallery and The Corridor Project.

For Ms Cook, however, being selected was about more than simply having her paintings displayed publicly.

Asked what it meant to walk through Cowra Hospital and see her work hanging there, her response was immediate.

“So exciting because it’s Cowra,” she said.

“I wanted to give back.

“I’ve had my kids in Cowra Hospital, and it’s just really great to have my art here and hopefully make people happy as they walk along the corridors.”

Her work forms part of a broader effort to ensure the new hospital reflects the community outside its doors.

The new artworks sit alongside pieces repurposed from the former hospital, while historical material has also been incorporated into the redevelopment, including a replica of the original 1884 hospital Land Grant.

Ms Cook’s contribution captures the Cowra she experiences with her family, sheep scattered across the countryside, cockatoos gathered near the river, rolling hills and the vivid colours she uses to reinterpret them.

Now those personal pieces of Cowra will become part of somebody else’s hospital experience.