A days Bird watching at a west London Reservoir. Bird watching is the one constant, the consistent, grounding thread that runs throughout Justin’s chaotic life; it’s this passion that brings light to the shade. When Justin does remark on having a good day, there is normally a list of birds to follow.
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry meeting!
After a year in hiatus, The Art of Psychiatry and the RCPsych Art SIG are joining forces to welcome their first guest artist to give a talk at the Royal College:
LOUIS QUAIL: BIG BROTHERÂ ARTIST TALK WITH Q&A
Date: Thursday October 4th 2018, 6pm – 8pm
Venue:Â Royal College of Psychiatrists, 21 Prescot Street, London, E1 8BB
Registration: £5.00- Book on Arts SIG Page
How to get tickets: Royal College of Psychiatrists members can get tickets via this link
People who are not members of the College are very welcome to attend. Tickets are available via calling Catherine Langley at the College on 0203 701 2592.
Louis Quail is a documentary photographer and will be discussing his recently published work ‘Big Brother’:
About Louis Quail and Big Brother:Â
“Big Brother is an intimate photographic portrait of Louis Quail’s older brother, Justin, and his daily struggle with schizophrenia. The condition is severe and Justin has been sectioned three times in his life. Yet, as the book shows, there is much more to him than his illness. He has interests, hobbies (painting and poetry and especially birdwatching). He also has love; he has been with his girlfriend, Jackie, for over 20 years.
By showing the person beyond the illness, Big Brother challenges stigma head on. It reveals a system in crisis; under resourced and creaking under the weight of its own bureaucracy, but it also discovers important truths on the nature of resilience. At its heart, though, Big Brother is a love story.
The book includes extensive texts to tell Justin’s story. The complexity of his life is reflected in the complex structure of the book which incorporates a number of inserts that provide a deep insight into Justin’s world through extracts from medical reports, police records and from his own notebooks. The book also includes many of Justin’s drawings and paintings as well as a separate booklet featuring both these and his poetry.
Louis Quail has worked extensively for some of the UK’s best known magazines and has been published in the UK and internationally over many years. He increasingly devotes his time to personal, long term projects. His work for Big Brother has already been awarded various prizes and received significant critical acclaim. His 2015 Arts Council funded show, ‘Before They Were Fallen’, which explored the aftermath of the Afghan War from the perspective of British military families, toured the UK and received extensive press coverage. Louis has twice been a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery portraiture award and his work is held in their permanent collection.â€
More information:
Louis Quail on Instagram
Buy Big Brother book on Amazon
Filed under: Books
Please join us for this upcoming Art of Psychiatry Society meeting!
Date: 20 July 2017 Venue/Time: Robin Murray Rm B in the IoPPN 6pm.
Speaker meeting with Dr Josephine McQuail
Janet Frame, Psychiatry, the Saving Role of the Maudsley and “Scriptotherapyâ€
We’re really pleased that Dr. Josephine McQuail is joining us to speak about Janet Frame (1924-2004), the innovative New Zealand writer. Frame spent time at the Maudsley, and her experience of psychiatric treatment was distinctly mixed.
The now infamous “sexologist†John Money, of Johns Hopkins, was a professor at the teacher’s college Frame attended in Dunedin, New Zealand, and became Frame’s first psychotherapist. This resulted in her being committed to the Seacliff Institution, narrowly averting a lobotomy. It was the recognition she got for her first collection of short stories, which John Money actually submitted for a literary prize on her behalf, which saved her. Her Seacliff psychiatrist saw in the newspaper that Frame had won the literary prize, and cancelled her surgery. Thus, Money’s romanticizing of the prototype of the “mad†artist both damned and saved Janet Frame, who would go on to have further psychiatric problems and encounters with the psychiatric profession.
The Maudsley Hospital, to which Frame was voluntarily committed for 6 months (1957-8) while on an extended stay in London, played a pivotal role in her psychiatric treatment. It was through John Money that she came to the Maudsley – while she was staying and writing in Ibiza, Spain, he became concerned about her mental state, mailed her an anti-psychotic drug, chlorpromazine, and told her when she arrived in London, her next stop after Spain, to seek help at the Maudsley, which had a reputation for humanitarian psychiatric treatment. Frame complied, even before Money had a chance to send a referral to Dr. Michael Shepherd. Eventually, however, Dr. Shepherd received Frame’s records from Seacliff, and an opinionated diagnosis from John Money. Despite all of this, Frame was assigned to Dr. Alan Miller, who seemed a perfect fit. Eventually, Dr. Miller and a psychiatric team headed by Sir Aubrey Lewis declared that Frame “never suffered from schizophreniaâ€.
Frame’s greatest treatment, however, was her writing. Before going to the Maudsley she declared, “ ‘To me the need to write and the act of writing are worth more than any opinions of what I write’ â€. Frame’s novel Daughter Buffalo will exemplify her practice of “scriptotherapy†– Suzette Henke’s term for therapeutic writing which allows the subject to work through trauma. In Daughter Buffalo (1972) Frame works through personal conflicts in her present time in a profound meditation on love and death. This novel could be called Frame’s Frankenstein, and shares a similar questioning of patriarchy with Mary Shelley’s iconic novel.
Dr. Josephine McQuail has published on William Blake, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, George Gissing, W. B. Yeats, and others, as well as on pedagogical issues. She is a professor of English at Tennessee Technological University. She is active in labor issues in academia. Her edited collection of essays on the New Zealand writer Janet Frame is forthcoming with McFarland Publishing in 2017.
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
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Contact us: www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk @artofpsychiatry theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN): http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/contact/findus/index.aspx
Filed under: Art
Please Join us for our upcoming Art of Psychiatry Society meeting:
“James Henry Pullen. The Genius of Earlswood Asylum”
with speaker Ian Jones-Healey
15 June 2017 6pm Robin Murray B IoPPN. All welcome!
Ian Jones-Healey is the Langdon Down Museum Archivist and journal/website editor for the Down’s Syndrome Association in Teddington south-west London. Ian is particularly interested in researching the social history of learning disability.
James Henry Pullen, (1835-1916), was a resident of the Royal Earlswood Asylum near Redhill. In his lifetime he was said to have the condition of savant syndrome though today he may have been diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Condition. Pullen created model ships including Brunel’s Great Eastern and the warship, Princess Alexandra. He also made a pictorial autobiography, imaginary ships, paintings and models.
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
Snacks and wine available.
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN): http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about/findus/index.aspx
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Read up beforehand! (optional of course)
The Langdon Down Museum:Â https://langdondownmuseum.org.uk/
James Henry Pullen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Pullen
Filed under: Art
Date: 6th of April 2017
Venue/Time: Robin Murray Rm A in the IoPPN 6pm.
Please join us for an evening of consideration on
“WHERE IS THE WORK IN THE WORK OF ART?â€.
Beth Elliott, Director of the Bethlem Gallery and Maker Sue Burbidge talk about practice and process at the Bethlem Gallery. What takes place before, during and after the making of an artwork? How are artists enabled to do what they do? Does the work lie in the minds of the audience, who after encountering the artwork, carry into the world with them new ideas, questions, feelings or forms? Join us for an evening of discussion to reach beyond art as an object and identify what might be called the ‘by-products’ of the art process.
Beth Elliot is currently working as the director of the Bethlem Gallery. Since graduating from University of the Arts London, Camberwell in 2002 she has focused her work on facilitating arts in mental health through workshops, residencies and exhibitions, and has also played an active role in supporting arts charities within the sector and beyond.
The Bethlem Gallery, established 1997, is a contemporary gallery situated on the grounds of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. The gallery delivers a programme of events that seeks to support artistic practice, strives to engage audiences in dialogue and debate on the subject of mental health alongside highlighting the value of access to the arts in healthcare environments and their importance in recovery.
To find out more about the gallery, please visit their website at http://bethlemgallery.com/
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
Snacks and wine available.
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN): http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about/findus/index.aspx
Filed under: Books
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry speaker meeting:
“James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine”
With our speaker – writer, historian and curator Mike Jay
Date: Thursday February 23rd
Venue:Â Robin Murray B Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
Time: 6pm
Please join us for a speaker meeting concerning the fascinating case of James Tilly Matthews. James Tilly Matthews was a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars. He was confined to the Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the “Air Loom†– a terrifying machine whose mesmeric rays and mysterious gases were brainwashing politicians and plunging Europe into revolution, terror, and war.  But caught up in high-level diplomatic intrigues in the chaos of the French revolution many of the conspiracies in which Matthews claimed to be involved were entirely real.
Matthew’s “Influencing Machine” has recently been materialized by artist Rod Dickinson, and is currently on view at the Bethlem Gallery.
About Mike Jay:
Mike Jay is a historian, curator and writer. His recent book is This Way Madness Lies, a highly illustrated history of madness and the asylum, published in the UK and USA by Thames & Hudson. It was written in conjunction with Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Bedlam: the asylum and beyond, on which he was guest curator. His previous book, The Influencing Machine, is out in paperback and on Kindle.  He reviews regularly for the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and the Literary Review.
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Find out more:
A film about James Tilly Matthews – https://vimeo.com/113601286
Mike Jay’s article about James Tilly Matthews – http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/11/12/illustrations-of-madness-james-tilly-matthews-and-the-air-loom/
Mike Jay’s book: Influencing Machine, The : James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom
About the Air Loom in the Bethlem – www.theairloom.org.
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
Filed under: Photography
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry speaker meeting :
Date: 17 November 2016
Venue/time: Viewing of exhibition in Maudsley Hospital Long Gallery 1745-1815hrs then Robin Murray Rm A in the IoPPN (see directions below)
Please join us for our last AoP meeting of the year!
We’re delighted that Caroline Smith, Interim Director of the Bethlem Museum of the mind will join us to speak about the current Maudsley Hospital Long Gallery exhibition “Before and After”, and exhibition of photographs of Bethlem patients from the mid-19th Century.
Between 1857 and 1859 Regent Street portrait photographer Henry Hering made several visits to Bethlem Royal Hospital, then at St George’s Fields, Southwark. He photographed several patients on the general wards as well as in its criminal department. These photographs more closely resemble ordinary portraits of the time rather than the ‘passport’ images of later asylum photography and capture individuals who have left little trace in the historical record. It is likely that he was attempting to document what was then known as the “physiognomy of insanity†or to provide evidence for the success of Bethlem’s new regime, though no record of his intentions has been kept. Whatever his purpose, the enduring result is a striking record of institutional life in mid-Victorian Britain.
Caroline Smith is currently Interim Director at Bethlem Museum of the Mind and part of a team behind Bethlem’s new Museum of the Mind (opened February 2015). Caroline also works as a freelance lecturer on painting and the history of art. She has a particular interest in early photography and in 2012-13, received funding from the National Portrait Gallery to support further research into the Bethlem photographs of Henry Hering.
About the Long Gallery: http://www.slam.nhs.uk/about-us/art-and-history/maudsley-long-gallery
Some of the photographs from the exhibition:Â http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/11422122/Henry-Herings-photographs-of-Bethlem-patients.html?frame=3204851
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
Crisps and wine available.
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Long Gallery:
– Enter the Maudsley Hospital through the main entrance on Denmark Hill. Turn left past the reception desk and follow the signs to the Long Gallery.
How to find the Maudsley Hospital
– http://www.slam.nhs.uk/our-services/hospital-care/maudsley-hospital
How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) for Robin Murray A: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about/findus/index.aspx
Filed under: Other
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry Society meeting:
‘Creative practice as mutual recovery’
Speaker meeting with Professor Paul Crawford
Venue:Â Seminar Room 4Â Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
Date: Thursday 22 September 2016
Time: 1800
Please join us for our first meeting after the summer break. We are excited to welcome Paul Crawford who is Professor of Health Humanities at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, The University of Nottingham. He directs the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health and co-directs the Health Humanities Research Priority Area. His research is in social and cultural aspects of mental health. He is Principal Investigator of ‘Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery’, a £1.5m study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK.
Prof Crawford is presenting paper on the potential for ‘mutual recovery’ between clinicians, informal carers and service users through creative practices in the arts and humanities.
More information about Prof Crawford’s Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery study is found here: http://www.healthhumanities.org/creative_practice_mutual_recovery/
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
Crisps and wine available.
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about/findus/index.aspx
Filed under: Art
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry Society speaker meeting
Thursday 17 March 2016 6pm
Seminar room 1 Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Denmark Hill.
Please join us for a speaker meeting about American abstract artist Agnes Martin, recently the subject of a Tate Modern retrospective. We’re very pleased that Dr Lena Fritsch, Tate Modern Assistant curator will be our speaker guest.
“Agnes Martin: her Art and Life”
Agnes Martin (1912–2004) was an American abstract painter. She was born in Canada but lived most of her life in the United States. She is best known for her meticulously rendered grid paintings and evocative stripes paintings marked out in subtle pencil lines and pale colour washes. Her art and way of living had a significant influence on her own, and subsequent generations of artists. After becoming a key figure in the male-dominated fields of 1950s and 1960s abstraction in New York, Martin abandoned the city in 1967 and went in search of solitude,  settling in New Mexico. Martin suffered from schizophrenia throughout her adult life. Working within tightly prescribed limits that she imposed on her own practice Martin was able to continue to make extraordinary paintings until her death in 2004.
Dr. Lena Fritsch is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, working on exhibitions (most recently Agnes Martin), displays and acquisitions of international art with a special focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Fritsch studied art history, Japanese studies and English studies at Bonn University, Germany as well as Keio University, Tokyo. She completed a PhD in 2010 with a thesis on Japanese photography (The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s, Georg Olms, Hildesheim 2011). Before joining Tate Modern in 2013, she worked at the Directorate General of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Most recent publications include: ‘The Floating Dresses of Hiroshima: War Memory in Ishiuchi Miyako’s Photography’, in Ayelet Zohar (ed.): Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Suppressed, Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 2015; ‘Well, I sit here and wait to be inspired: Photographs of Agnes Martin’ in Frances Morris (ed.), Agnes Martin, Tate Modern, London 2015; ‘Von dunkler Dekadenz und christlicher Mystik: Verbindungen zwischen Geoffrey Hills Gedicht “A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook†und präraffaelitischen Bildern [Dark Decadence and Christian Mysticism: Relationships Between Geoffrey Hill’s Poem “A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook†and Pre-Raphaelite Paintings]’, in Susanne Gramatzki and Renate Kroll (eds.), Wie Texte und Bilder zusammenfinden, Berlin 2015.
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
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Contact us:
www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk
@artofpsychiatry
theartofpsychiatry@gmail.com
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about/findus/index.aspx
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Picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aechase/
Filed under: Film
My Mother Tongue
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry meeting
Tuesday 2nd February 1800hrs
Seminar room 5 Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Denmark Hill.
AoP Short film evening:
For our next meeting we pleased to show the work of three film makers whose work touches on themes of mental illness. Each artist will be present to discuss their films and the evening is chaired by Dr David O’Flynn, consultant psychiatrist and chair of the Adamson Trust.
About the film makers:
Dolly Sen is an award-winning writer, artist, performer and filmmaker. She has had 10 books published and contributed chapters to several other books. Her subversive blogs around art, disability and humour have a huge international following, and since 2004 she has exhibited and performed internationally. Her films have been shown worldwide, including at the Barbican. Her public speaking on mental health has taken her all over Europe, including the World Health Organisation and Oxford University. www.dollysen.com
Susan Young is a BAFTA-nominated animation director based in London. Carnival, her Royal College of Art graduation film, features the fluid, dynamic line that defines her commercial work, which includes The Doomsday Clock, a film about multilateral disarmament for the United Nations, Beleza Tropical: Umbabarauma, for musician David Byrne, and Jimi Hendrix: Fire, for producer Alan Douglas. She is currently researching animation’s capacity as a medium for processing psychological trauma at the Royal College of Art and as part of this research is using autobiographical material to create a trilogy of film experiments while exploring new animation techniques. www.susanyounganimation.com
Antonia Attwood graduated from BA Hons in Photography in 2014. Her practice in still and moving image explores ideas around the phenomenology of mental health. Since graduating Antonia has done artist talks at Photofusion Gallery, Free Space Gallery, The Dragon Cafe and The Broadway Cinema Nottingham. She has also had exhibitions at The Depot Clapton, Brighton Photo Fringe and The London College of Communication. Antonia has had two commissions from the Institute of Inner Vision to date. Antonia has experience working directly with people who have experience with mental illness. Creating short films with volunteers from the Dragon Cafe as well as her Mother who has Bipolar disorder. http://www.antoniaattwood.com
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This is an open meeting and all are welcome (including SLaM employees, psychiatry trainees, service users, members of the public). No need to book. It’s okay to turn up late. Entrance is free!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Upcoming Art of Psychiatry Society meeting:
The session will include a showing of a short film by film maker, Suzie Hanna, commissioned by Sally for a festival celebrating Plath’s creative life.
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is best known for her confessional poetry and her semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Bell Jar’, as well as her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes. Plath was depressed for much of her adult life and committed suicide in 1963 in London.
Sally Bayley is a Teaching and Research Fellow at The Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, and a tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. She is the author of Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford University Press, 2007). Eye Rhymes was the first study of Plath’s art work in relation to her body of poetry and prose and was featured in the Sunday Times magazine, on Radio 4 and at the Royal Festival Hall alongside a series of uniquely commissioned pieces of theatre, dance, art and animation, several of which won awards.
Sally has just completed a study of the diary as an art form: ‘The Private Life of the Diary, from Pepys to Tweets’ to be published by Unbound books next spring. www.unbound.co.uk/books/the-
Crisps and wine provided.
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How to find the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience: