PROJECT DIARIES

from Outside In: New Dialogues Project

PROJECT DIARIES

Mental Health

Museum: A creative and emotive journey

As part of the second Step Up course Exploring Collections at the Mental Health Museum, artist Doll shares their journey to a New Dialogue. The result is part creative response and part emotion diary, both reflecting on the process to help further understand the difficult history and potential trigger points. Content warning:

Pregnancy termination

Chapter one: It’s always interesting when you start a new project, no matter how much you try to go in with an open mind you carry some prior notions with you.

I have found this on my first foray into the Mental Health Museums collection; listening to the presentations has challenged some of my perceptions around the idea of the role these institutions played both in individuals and communities lives.

Perhaps the most poignant moment this week was discovering that part of the admissions process involved the cutting of hair, this fact unsettled me far more than many of the other depersonalisation practices.

Something about an act that can be one of self care, pampering or even reinvention being used in this way feels so invasive. It’s certainly been unsettling to sit with, but something that I feel deserves exploring – the people who lived it deserve the lessons from it to be honoured.

Chapter two: This week has been challenging for me, some of the topics explored have led me down rabbit holes of thought I was not prepared for.

I want to say that challenging doesn’t equate to bad –uncomfortable, difficult, draining but not bad.

Paperwork, notes, risk assessments, ledgers and reports – we ‘the ill’ are reduced to piles of text in a system that has not seen true advancement in over 20 years.

So apparent is this need to document that much of the real interactions or expressions of those that spent time in institutions like The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum are lost. The personal art works of many patients were simply thrown away en masse while the handwritten notes of a nurse have been preserved along with countless frigid photos of ‘life at the asylum’.

In all the text the thing that is missing is context.

Each case file is a life recorded, but not a story told.

In relating this to my own turbulent mental health I can’t help but wonder what my file says about me. Does it list my symptoms like a builder’s estimate, items that need to be fixed and ticked off? Where is it recorded that I hate my voice because it betrays my past and invites questions from strangers? Has any one of the many professionals I have seen over the past decade written about how I was told to ‘be happy’ so as not ruin the family Christmas as I grieved the forced termination of my baby.

Trauma is not a list to be compiled. It’s convenient to ask what happened, easier to document and send you home after an hour or place your name on yet another waiting list.

Its an interesting concept, the information we keep versus what we omit. How much can you manipulate a narrative? Can you recast the roles, change a dynamic….even label someone as insane?

Chapter three: After some intense reflections, prompted by complex nuances of mental illness, it is with a smile that in this diary I can share more creatively centred ponderings.

Wading through the echoes of the past it can be all too easy to be pulled into the undertow of ethics and morals – seeing things in a linear way, each revelation undoing the anchors you had set to avoid drowning in the ‘what ifs’.

The temptation to pursue the ‘story’ is one I am trying to battle, not least because in the absence of personal corroboration everything I discover or articulate is essentially adding to the problem.

As I prepare for my trip to the archives I am reminding myself that I entered into this project to cut the red tape restraints and reconnect the compassion, empathy and context of those of us that live with mental illness – past present and future.

Part of this reminder for me has been creating, exploring and allowing my mind to wander while I feel. It may sound like an odd thing to say in reference to the subject matter but I am drawn to playing with materials, concepts and techniques.

Inviting the unfettered imagination of my inner child is refreshing, beneficial and freeing.

The importance of this feeling of freedom is a bittersweet counterpoint to the constraints of adulthood, rules, perceptions and inherited self image.

I sat watching my peers industrious in artistic expression and I wondered how many of the names we have been researching had felt this exact same kinship – almost content to be allowed to just…be.

I was struck by this correlation as I wiped by ink-streaked hands in the printmaking studio at The Art House (our amazing home for the duration of this course). The afternoon had been full of experimentation and chat, we existed as equals without barriers or labels, each of us focused on individual tasks but more connected than ever.

My process is being refined, recalibrated and ultimately improved as a result of the consistent balancing of the information and imagination. I have often told those wishing to get to know me that I am ruled by my contradictions, once said with a tone of thinly veiled contempt, I now have an appreciation for this duality and the influence it casts over my art.

So, before I give in to the impulse to make a sarcastic or self deprecating comment on ‘my art’, I am going back to my earbuds, Goldfrapp and creating like nobody is watching.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like an artist, ever. I’ve always been careful about how I identify my creativity, so I’ve said ‘Oh I’m a designer,’ or ‘I’m really arty, I create a lot.’ But never artist. And the difference in me today from when I first saw the advert for Exploring Collections it’s not just night and day it’s black hole and stars maybe.”

“I loved the fact that a previous cohort was co-facilitating on my course which indicated it was an opportunity. Rather than talking about it we were at in the presence of an artist who had been on the course and who was about to have an exhibition in her own right and I have always said that the strongest tool we have in recovery is role modelling.”

GLENSIDE HOSPITAL MUSEUM: LOOKING TO THE LIGHT

Glenside Hospital Museum has an extensive collection telling the story of Bristol Psychiatric and Learning Disability Hospitals. The museum is set inside the Asylum chapel within the grounds of the purpose-built hospital. It has over 80 documentary drawings of life at the hospital in the 1950s produced by Denis William Reed, an artist and patient at this time.

Looking to the Light was an exciting exhibition of contemporary art exploring mental health care and mental health treatment that took place at Glenside Hospital Museum.

The theme of the exhibition was inspired by the patient Charles West, who was photographed in 1897 at Bristol’s psychiatric hospital and the stained-glass windows depicting saints and healing that bathe the Museum in coloured light. Many aspects of the museum and its history – from a padded room to the use of mosquitoes in treatment – caught the imaginations of the 10 artists involved.