Outside In, British Art Network Resource: New Dialogues Research Group 2023–24
NEW DIALOGUES: ART CREATED HISTORICALLY IN MENTAL HEALTH SETTINGS
RESEARCH GROUP 2023-24
The UK has a number of very significant collections of work produced by patients historically residing in asylums and psychiatric hospitals, but in comparison in particular to Europe, these collections are not as well-known and are often buried within wider health archives. On top of this invisibility, there is a long history of the mistreatment of artwork made by people historically in mental health settings. In some cases, the
work has been taken from the artist by medical professionals or collections, or it has been destroyed, considered only as an activity to pass the time or medical intervention. There is also the added implication of enduring stigma that has for so long surrounded people who have experienced – and continue to experience –mental health issues and the implications of this stigma on how their artwork is shown, received and validated.
Historically, artwork produced in hospital settings has been seen or presented in the following ways:
• As evidence that someone is suffering from mental health issues
• As a medical record and therefore hidden away in medical archives
• Anonymously or under a pseudonym
• Interpreted by medical professionals, psychiatrists or academics.
This research group aims to explore this fascinating yet overlooked area, which has the potential to reduce stigma around mental health, engage wider audiences with art and artists from diverse backgrounds, and stimulate conversations, awareness and new insights into the intersection between mental health and creativity.
This group has been formed on the back almost nine years of work by arts charity Outside In in partnership with collections and organisations
including the Vawdrey Archive, the Adamson Collection at the Wellcome Trust, the Mental Health Museum, Glenside Hospital Museum, and the Art Extraordinary Collection at Glasgow Museums. Work by the charity in this area has brought together museums, collections and archives with artists with their own lived experience to challenge the existing narratives that underline works produced historically in mental health settings, and has highlighted a need for more research around ethical implications, best practice and shared learning.
The questions this group aims to address include:
• How can we best interpret and exhibit art that has been created historically in mental healthcare settings, ensuring that peoplwe with their own lived experience are at the centre of interpretation and curation?
• What is the ethical impact of sharing art created in mental healthcare settings, on the public, the healthcare setting, and the artist?
• How can the curatorial process best explore and/ or promote wider public conversations around sharing art created in mental healthcare settings?
• Alongside exploration of these questions, the research group will address how artists and people with their own lived experience can be prioritised in the research, interpretation and curation of this work, providing context, validation and visibility for the artists who created this unique yet ultimately hidden work.
ACTIVITY IN 2023
In 2023, the New Dialogues research group engaged with several collections including: The Vawdrey Archive, Mental Health Museum and Adamson Collection; the group also heard from artists, psychiatrists, art therapists and curators to explore how art produced historically in mental health settings is currently catalogued, archived and displayed.
The group recorded discussions and interviews with everyone from collections managers to artists with lived experience, showcasing the variety of approaches to art display. Artwork remained a central focus, with each event incorporating a creative prompt/activity to encourage exploration of themes such as consent and copyright, modern-day creative workshops in acute wards, found objects and restricted creativity.
Jo Doll, Outside In artist and research group co-lead said, ‘The end of our first year and midpoint review has been bittersweet for me… My hopes for this project were to approach it from a place of empathy and connection,
fuelled by creativity and an urge to make a more balanced and reciprocal curatorial landscape. While I am proud of all we have achieved so far with the BAN New Dialogues group events, I am overwhelmed by how much is still left unexplored…’
ACTIVITY IN 2024
In 2024, the group expanded on the research by focusing on questions of how to curate compassionate exhibitions informed by lived experiences.
Live curation exercises informed by exhibitions and collections at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind and Mental Health Museum were attended by research group members and offered the chance to actively discuss and consider how displays of this kind of art could be improved. The group also explored the theme of compassionate curating through several recorded research interviews with Art Extraordinary Collection, the Glenside Hospital Museum and the Eternal Journal project. You can view these recordings here.
In March 2024, an artist-focused event offered insight into how much art really impacts the lives of individuals and benefits their wellbeing. This event also allowed the group time to consider how these artists wanted to be represented and how they wanted their work to be talked about.
2024 was characterised by this emphasis on centering artists; Charlotte and Doll offered three paid Creative Research bursaries to Outside In artists. Working over the course of four months,
Rebecca Buckley, Zack Mennell and Dee Lister, gained first-hand experience researching and developing artwork in response to the research group materials and associated collections. The artists documented their creative research journey exploring recordings, artist interviews and the archives of some collections of art made in mental health settings. By showcasing the expert by experience voice, we highlighted new perspectives on these collections, and enabled artists to become researchers.
The final event of 2024 brought the group together online. It offered the chance to explore the findings of the research group over the two years, as well as get involved in a creative activity led by one of Outside In’s artists, Andrea Mindel. True to the research group’s original intentions to keep the research grounded in creativity, this workshop
centred around enclosure, containment, freedom and safety, allowing participants to explore and consider their own journeys with the research before gently closing them up. The final session also looked to the future, inviting participants to share their own research focuses and find routes to collaborating to continue the research further.
Our final showcase included the unveiling of a collaborative artwork, created from audio recordings of research group members describing what compassionate curating looks like to them. Compiled into a visual representation of soundwaves overlapping
against a backdrop of a close-up photograph of the interior of a padded cell at the Mental Health Museum, this felt like a powerful way to creatively showcase the work of the research group over the past two years.
A NOTE ON OUR RESEARCH
In researching this area, we have repeatedly acknowledged that the language and terminology used to describe mental health settings historically and even, in some areas, still today, has been problematic. We recognise that people compelled to live in psychiatric settings may have been there for reasons that we would today consider discriminatory, including the wealth of the family, how close they lived to these institutions, the size of the family and how many resources they had to care for each other, as well as societal expectations of marital obedience, and outdated gender, sexual and romantic ‘norms’.
In this resource, we have determined to use language informed by lived experience
which recognises that artists creating in these settings may not have been ‘ill’, were not ‘disturbed’ and did not simply ‘recover’ and live peaceful lives thereafter.
However, we also realise that our language does and should continually evolve and will continue to become outdated. For this reason, we commit to continually listening and reflecting on this topic and adapting our processes in consequence.
We have explored a lot but would like to further explore international approaches to curating exhibitions of art made in mental health settings and collection management and storage of these artworks.
If you are starting to work with collections of art created in mental health settings, either historically or now, and considering how to display this in a compassionate and ethically informed way, these are some simple starting points and recommendations for considerations for curators/ archivists/ museums.
• Work with individuals with lived experience to foreground these experiences and present living artists with their own words if possible
• Collaboratively co-curate to ensure a diversity of ideas and experience
• Consider accessibility practice and scholarship
• Develop inclusive methods of working and developing exhibitions at each stage
• Tell authentic, personal and evidenced stories that do not erase the history of the individual
• Create policies that can evolve over time and are open to redevelopment
• Challenge stereotypes and medicalised viewpoints to present well-rounded, full stories of individuals that showcase more than their mental health
• Recognise intersectionality and privilege within the experiences of those living with mental health challenges
• Consider how museums, collections and galleries can centre the interests of artists and balance these with commercial incentives, time pressures and content views. These can be mutually beneficial because centring artists in your organisation will mean that other artists want to work with you and will draw a more diverse and inclusive audience
• Gain the express permission of artists or next of kin or estate wherever possible before displaying
• Develop accessible alternative ways of presenting contracts and agreements for work to be displayed
• Include contract clauses which recognise the right of the artist to withdraw display permissions at any time
• Orphan works are still valuable and can provide thoughtful and incisive insights into the work of a collection
• Consider the context in which these works were created- ie in private art therapy, was the creator an artist beforehand?
• Challenge the origins of collections- what ties these works together, do these works deserve to be defined by the doctor who collected them?
• How museums can ethically curate patient artwork considering credits versus anonymity
• Incorporate ‘patient’ artwork and ‘outsider’ artwork into the context of all exhibitions rather than relegating it to the margins of the artworld
• Continue these conversations and develop your own best practice framework
• Carefully consider displays to build a narrative with ethical descriptions that do not simply rely on one-dimensional medical diagnoses of artists
• Acknowledge that approaches may need to differ between institutions and collections
• Display your approach to ethical and compassionate curating visibly on your website
FINAL RESPONSES AND MORE ON THIS PROJECT
• To watch recordings of our events and interviews from the research project, click here
• To read more about Research group Co-Lead, Doll’s reflections on each event, click here
• We encourage everyone to continue to research this area and keep creating. If you are looking for inspiration, you can see our Creative Activities here
• Creative Researcher, Dee Lister has published a three part zine, available here:
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• To see more about the project as a whole, click here
• To read more about the Creative Researcher’s work, please click here
OTHER PROJECTS TO GET INVOLVED WITH
Jo Doll, one of the research group’s Co-Leads is developing further research projects, residencies and opportunities to influence the representation of these collections of art- for more information and to get involved, you can contact jo.doll@outsidein.org.uk
For more information on the research group project or Outside In, you can contact charlotte.graham-spouge@ outsidein.org.uk
SPEAKERS AND COLLABORATORS
Jane Stockdale, Mental Health Museum
Sally-Anne Evans, Mental Health Museum
Bel Pye
Jennifer Milarski
Lucy Finchett-Maddock
Rachel Johnston
Kirsty Sidebottom, NHS
Jessica Kelly, NHS
Cara Macwilliam
David O’Flynn, Adamson Collection
Rose Ruane, University of Glasgow
Stella Mann, Glenside Hospital Museum
Cheryl McGeachan, University of Glasgow
Tony Lewis, Art Extraordinary Collection
Amy Shiner, Eternal Journal Project
Dolly Sen
Lorna Collins
Debs Teale
Tom Stimpson
Jo Rosenthal
Sophie Leighton, Bethlem Gallery
Colin Gale, Bethlem Museum of the Mind
RESEARCH GROUP CO-LEADS
Charlotte Graham-Spouge
Jo ‘Doll’
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Kate Davey, who initially started this research, and to all the individual artists who generously contributed their artwork to the project.
CREATIVE RESEARCHERS
Dee Lister
Zack Mennell
Rebecca Buckley
IMAGE CREDITS
Jasmin Janiurek
Jo Doll, Portraits of Madness
Dee Lister, Feeling Strung Out
Dee Lister, after Lynda Bamford, Psychedelic Woman
Dee Lister
Lisa Matysiak
Dee Lister, after work from the Bethlem Museum of the Mind archives
Jo Doll, visual notetaking from session
Jo Doll, Portraits of Madness
Dee Lister, I don’t feel like playing today
Jo Doll, Not all memories are welcome
Bel Pye
Charlotte Graham-Spouge
Melanie Hodge
Charlotte Graham-Spouge
Melanie Hodge
Joanne Tiffany
Dee Lister
Charlotte Graham-Spouge
Jennifer Milarski
Zack Mennell, facsimile of Edward Adamson’s ‘Pornagraphic drawings ’,
Wellcome Collection
Zack Mennell
Jane Stockdale
Dee Lister, after work from the Bethlem Museum of the Mind archives
Anonymous Artist
Participants at the Mental Health Museum
Anonymous Artist and Jo Doll
Participants at the Mental Health Museum
Jo Doll at the Mental Health Museum
Jane Stockdale holding the final collaborative artwork
Collaborative research group artwork
Zack Mennell
Carrie Scott-Huby
Participant notes from Mental Health Museum
Zack Mennell
Jo Doll, Portraits of Madness
Dee Lister
Dee Lister
Jo Doll, Portraits of Madness
Lorna Collins
Anonymous Artist
Jo Doll
Zack Mennell
Dee Lister
Dee Lister
Dee Lister, after work from the Bethlem Museum of the Mind archives
Dee Lister
Dee Lister
All
are taken by artists themselves or photographed by Charlotte Graham-Spouge
