Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about in an unknown world. If the answer is yes, then what more do you want?
Wassilly Kandinsky
Bethlem Royal Hospital has a continuous history of over 700 years of confining and treating patients. This history is in many ways the history of the social definition of mental illness and the approaches to its treatment. Contained within that past are the stories of the many artists that have passed through and produced work at Bethlem and continue to do so today. Though much of the stigma surrounding mental illness has receded in more recent years this still needs to be continually challenged.
For the last ten years a hiatus of artistic activity at Bethlem Royal Hospital has developed around the studio and gallery there. Through residencies, workshops and exhibitions both patients and staff have produced novel approaches to creative and collective work in the field of art. The following interview was conducted to celebrate the Tenth anniversary of the Bethlem Gallery and is intended as a brief introduction to the vital creative work that goes on at Bethlem Hospital.
In Spring, 2007, a discussion took place in the art studio within the occupational therapy department of Bethlem Royal Hospital. Present were Karen Risby, Beth Elliott the two artists who run the art studio, Anthony Iles a freelance writer, Max Reeves and Lee Galpin both artists who have exhibited at Bethlem gallery.
Max: There’s been a long history of well known artists working whilst interned at Bethlem has there always been an interest in artists work at an institutional level?
Karen: Within OT there has always been some sort of program for craft or art, but from what I’ve heard it was on a much smaller scale than it is now. The art room used to be where that gallery is now so it was very very small, only a few people would have gone. When I arrived, the art room had moved into this building, and since then I’ve knocked walls down. I wanted it to reflect a proper working studio space rather than a therapy room. There tends to be between 30-40 people who use the art room in any given week. Of those some patients may be here for two weeks some for four years. Overall there are just over 300 people in hospital. The patients can be here from anything from 2 weeks to 4 years, the average being about 6 months… and then you get the people who are leaving and coming back in again and again, so we often develop a relationship over time.
Beth: A visitor walked into the art room during a session and said ‘this feels like it’s all happening here, it feels like the heart of the hospital.’ What’s really important about this space is that there is a feeling of freedom that the patient staff relationship is at its most fluid. We try to make a space that people can make their own.
Beth: But it’s always down to individuals, it’s not an overall policy to prioritise these things. Its more unusual to have someone like Karen or Michael (Curator of Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum & Archives) who come in and pioneer the arts and promote them and make a special space for them. When Richard Dadd was around he got the paints he needed and the space he needed, there was clearly someone who was helping him and identified it as important.
Max: How does your department relate directly and historically with the archives and museum?
Karen: Before the Bethlem Gallery was around I think patients would just go along to the archives and say ‘I’m an artist do you want my work’ (which they still do). The arrival of the gallery ten years ago created more opportunities for artists’ work to be collected by the archives. The archives now use the gallery from time to time when they would like to show work that can’t be seen because of the size of the current display part of the museum.
Put it this way I worked out that by staging four exhibitions per year we have enough work to last us 20 years with new artists approaching us all the time.
In 1997 I organised an exhibition called Art Beyond Bedlam to mark the 750th anniversary of Bethlem, we advertised for artists to take part who’d had contact with the services of the Bethlem at some point. I was overwhelmed by the response and it was the breadth of work from this core group of artists that made it apparent that a permanent exhibition space was needed. People also hear about the gallery through the grapevine and are recommended by people who’ve read about or visited the gallery. Up until now the only criteria required to exhibit in the gallery has been a strong body of work and to have had contact with the Trust’s services.
We have some great permanent examples of substantial residencies here on site. The legacy of this work, created by artists and patients, is the constant inspiration for patients staff and visitors at the hospital.
We feel it is vital that any work created during a residency is a collaborative approach in which artists and patients have an equal input in the ideas process, the making of the work and what they get out of it. The amazing thing about the residencies at Bethlem is that the experience is a two way street, with the artists getting as much inspiration as the patients. In the more clinical aspects of the hospital there isn’t any room for that kind of relationship.
Anthony: How did you get involved with the hospital and the OT program here?
Karen: Initially, I wasn’t brought in as an artist. I created my own role and I think people like us within the NHS and within psychiatric services are people who have created their own roles. The art program is not seen as an integral part of overall services which is what we’re really trying to change. We’re still seen as an added extra. We would like to be seen as an important component of patient’s treatment. But there are a lot of cuts and people and services like us are the first to go.
Lee: There’s an attitude amongst medical staff that OT is a place just to keep people occupied between certain hours so they don’t have to worry about them. What they don’t realise is that this is fundamental to their treatment of the patients here. Pills are ok, counseling is ok and it will get you back on the streets, but what keeps your mind alive is what you learn here. That’s what it’s about – keeping your spirit alive.
Karen: I think it might be worthwhile here saying a bit more about how this hospital is set up… we have local community wards, for people who are acutely unwell. And then we have the national units for specific disorders, like addictions, eating disorders, affective disorders, a mother and baby unit etc. Over the years we have got to know lots of patients who’ve come back to the hospital more than once some many times over. We know that if there were more facilities like this in the community it would help to prevent people coming back into hospital. It costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep people in hospital. We know lots people who would really benefit from, just a little bit of structure and an art studio where they can come and work. It’s very simple, someone once worked out in a years art budget how much each patient gets and it’s about 2p.
Beth: This kind of facility, not only provides you with materials and equipment that you wouldn’t necessarily get access to yourself it provides a community… if you need to have a chat with other people or go to an exhibition with other people or have something to stop that isolation, then it’s a resource, something you can tap into when you need to. You don’t want to shove it in people’s faces, but it should be there for people to come down and share a space together and make work together and have discussion around their work. We’re interested in process rather than finished project
It comes as news to no-one that in every social dimension we have been witnessing a massive privatisation of destiny and an individual internalisation of responsibility. This is evident in welfare and labour market ‘reform’ (adjust the flexible worker to the fancies of the market) and speculative science … but nowhere more than in ‘mental health’.
Matthew Hyland ‘Social Misery, Mad Pride‘ Mute Vol.1 #20
Anthony: I think that much of the negative picture painted by the media of mental health service users is related to a kneejerk response to cuts in the NHS and specifically in the mental health sector. The rhetoric used by Thatcher and continued by Blair, of ‘care in the community’ seems elide the reality that successive governments have reduced the level of mental health provision whilst also attacking community resources that might help keep people ’sane’.
Karen: I used to be able to direct people leaving the hospital to at least five different arts initiatives in the community and now they’ve pretty much all gone. These life-lines have been cut.
Beth: this hospital has just been made into a ‘Foundation Trust’ and I feel either this move will make the system much more efficient and stop wasting money (as you do see this quite a lot) or it will turn it into a business and everything that is viewed a luxury will be cut.
LG: Everything is ‘target-led’… but how can you quantify the unquantifiable?
Max: How do you feel about the popular perception of the relationship between art and mental health?
Karen: 1 in 7 people experience mental health problems in this country so my theory is that we’re all treading a fine line.
Beth: I don’t think you can expect the link to be present in everyone. I work with a lot of artists in different settings and I think we are more often than not a fragile crazy bunch, but I don’t think necessarily everyone with a mental health problem have a natural ability to make things. I think there is a relationship between emotion, thought and art and therefore when you feel strongly or see things in a particular way then there can be an impulse to translate any of that and give your visions a physical presence. There are of course many creative ways of expressing yourself and different mediums appeal to different people.
Karen: As a society we rarely take time out to think about what we like, what we want to do, how do we want to express ourselves.
Karen: Coming back to the outsider art thing…I started doing this work because I was interested in why we have the urge to create, there are people who are creating extraordinary work without any interest in showing it to others, they are just doing what they need to do, that’s what I still find really amazing. There are some extremely prolific artists in the hospital who produce mountains of work, using whatever they can get their hands on to do it including soap to draw with on bits of tissue… impulsive.
Beth: the bottom line is when you’re an artist you are trying to show people the way you see the world whether you are an ‘outsider artist’ or an ‘insider artist’. The current gallery system can be suffocating and predictable and commercially motivated I don’t think that always creates the freest most inspirational artwork. Essentially most artists are coming from the same view point of wanting to realise their ideas and give the work it’s life.
Karen: There are no strategies within the Trust or within the NHS (that I am aware of) that drive forward the development and integration of the arts in health. On one level hospital management and even higher political figures are very supportive and even recognize the benefits of the arts. But what we really need is to be given the right resources to develop. Unless someone higher up the food chain sees the benefit and the potential cost savings and demands change we and people like us are stuck.
We would like for the art and other creative studios to be open all day and into the evening. We would also like them to be more accessible to staff. There are not many perks that come with working within the NHS, and they are always looking for ways to retain staff, they could potentially save money on agency staff by offering cut price access to art workshops and other hospital facilities. There would definitely be better dynamics between staff and patients if they were working together on projects in the art studios. That has been clearly demonstrated during our open studio days.
Potentially the studios could be opened to the public. This would bring money into the department and would be a great way of educating the local community about what goes on at Bethlem; it would help to close the ‘them and us’ gap. We have remarkable facilities that sit dormant for long periods of time.
We would also like to see local mental health service users accessing the facilities, many of them leave the hospital and have very limited access to anything creative or social, and many usually end up back in hospital again.
The gallery needs at least a full time curator and an administrator. We could tour shows and work collaboratively with other arts and health organizations.
Because the exhibitions usually focus on an individual it helps to remind people (general public, psychiatrists, hospital staff) that a diagnosis is not really that important on the grand scale of things. Every person we meet is completely different. They all have they’re own story. If we listened to more of the stories before jumping to conclusions or making decisions about a person’s future we may better understand the mental health of our society and how we can help it. Our exhibitions provide an outlet for these stories and experiences and emphasise the importance of the individual.
