You are now at the final stop in this exhibition.
After months of searching the archive and following various potential leads, the artworks Amiss exhibited in ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (“The Snakepit”)’ have not yet been found.
What the research process did reveal was that the title of Amiss’s exhibition was literal. The works she exhibited were made while detained in a locked ward in January 2001. We also realised this was not her only exhibition of ward drawings, which had also been the focus of an exhibition she made in the year 2000.
Arranged on the wall in front of you are 44 sheets of blank A5 paper. These represent the missing works from ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’. The labels underneath give their titles, which we know thanks to the exhibition price list in the archive. Their names suggest that the subjects of the drawings varied from views out of the window to figurative studies of nurses and other people detained in the ward, and objects around the ward, such as plants and office chairs.
We do know what one of these works looked like because it was reproduced on the poster discussed on the last track. A reproduction of that drawing is shown here among the lost works.
This display of missing works was developed in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Mental Health Team’s Lived Experience advisors, who highlighted the importance of remembering such survivor-led projects even in their absence, due to long histories of erasure.
You’ll now hear from some lived-experience perspectives on these missing works from ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’, starting with artist Dolly Sen, who met Audrey Amiss through Survivors Speak Out.
[Dolly Sen]
“Walls walls, a mad person, a psych patient knows about walls. Walls that trap you inside, whether it’s the walls of a locked ward, or the walls surrounding our hearts, minds and selves. These walls that separate, you do not know our story. You do not know Audrey or me, or other survivors through our patient notes. You will not find us here. Audrey made the walls surrounding her beautiful, meaningful, something that was her own. Us psychiatric patients are not allowed to tell our story without redaction, erasure, without being judged inferior.
“Everything we seem to do is seen as sickness, when all we want to say is that we have been here too, that we are human and understand beauty. So erased art should have its walls. Audrey should have her exhibition of work no longer here, because it’s an exhibition of the continuing erasure of society, of the art and story of survivors to say we are here too, and society, you have taken already too much from us.
“I wonder if the artwork ‘View Across the River’ is an artistic rendering of the view from a psych ward at St Thomas’ Hospital in south London; it’s no longer there, by the way. I stayed there myself in July 2005. I used to hang around the windows looking at the river, for its beauty, for its promise of freedom, for its glow. It was more therapeutic to our souls than anything that was on the wrong side of the windows we looked out upon.
“And the artwork ‘Two Pillows’, I think, it was her artistic response to items and people on a locked ward. And I think she wanted to capture the sadness, the loneliness, the pain, the grasping at dignity in just a few lines. Lines that captured a world people turned their backs on. A mark-making onto enforce a happiness. Items on a locked ward just carry a pain that’s not on the outside. ‘Two Pillows’ I think, express loneliness, isolation, the wrinkles on the pillowcase were holding dreams the world didn’t care about.”
[Tania Pandia]
“My name is Tania Pandia and I am a Lived Experience Advisor for the Mental Health team at Wellcome. Personally, I have never been hospitalised in a psychiatric institution, but looking at Audrey’s works, and her effort to exhibit them, to some extent I think I understand I recognise and understand that existential desire to meticulously document one’s own life. It’s an effort to reaffirm to oneself that I exist, and I am real, and this is all significant to me.
“It’s also a way to remind others that people like me exist in this world, that our struggle is also part of the human condition. We are not invisible. To ignore this is to ignore many others who have walked my path. To ignore this is to omit a large and constant part of human civilisation. Staying in the ward wasn’t just one flat and stigmatised experience of contending with one’s own sanity. It’s also consisted of the mundane details, the quiet reflections, nurses and doctors passing by.
“Days string together, the food we ate, the people we met, the views from the window, small decorations in our room, all served as reminders that my life, our life, is so much bigger and more vibrant that just the meagre container of this ward room.”
In the process of searching for these works, we learned just how widely Amiss distributed her ward drawings beyond exhibiting or selling them.
For example, she framed them and donated them to charity shops to sell. She posted them to MPs, along with letters calling for mental health reform.
She submitted them for publication to HarperCollins and publishers specialising in books by mental health survivors. She even handed them into a police station in 2004.
This helped shed light on Amiss’s intentions in sharing these drawings, which included using them to raise awareness of the use of force and detention in psychiatric treatment, and to call for approaches to mental health that afford people more agency in the kinds of support they receive.
Mental health survivors continue this movement today.
That brings us to the end of ‘Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions’. The tactile path will lead you out of this room and back to the entrance area. The end of the tactile line is marked by a tile with raised lines rather than dots.
In the foyer, you can return your handset if you are using one, or you can make your way through the archway opposite to visit the parallel exhibition by Rudy Loewe, if you would like to explore that next.