Unimaginable imagining: Fantasies and works off the margin

Abstract

Since the 1940s art therapists have often worked with marginalised people and marginalised imaginations. The expressions of this can be strikingly original, yet fit uneasily with any genre. Artists becoming therapists were presented with radical opportunities to witness, support and possibly befriend those possessing, or possessed by, ways of seeing, feeling and thinking contradicting conventional consciousness. This was particularly true in the large populations inhabiting psychiatric institutions in Britain until the 1980s. This paper describes the work and ‘performances’ of five people; three of whom it was possible to know well, and the unusual ways of being of the others could only be experienced. The approach is not ‘scientifically’ clinical but more like anthropological reportage and stories about ‘characters’. Change is of course aim of psychotherapy, but so is witnessed. No matter what traumas lay in their past, over time they had become who they most memorably were.

Keywords:

• Outsider
• psychosis
• art
• therapy
• performance
• image

Notes

¹‘… . now, beauty: cover or re-mix?’, 19--21 March 2004. A symposium organised by Domenico de Clario, Head of the School of Contemporary Arts at Edith Cowan University and Marie Bonnal, Director of the Bureau of Ideas, Perth.

²Friern Hospital closed in 1993 despite protests by patient groups and mental health professionals. It was sold off to a property company who converted the frontage of the building with its Italianate façade into luxury flats, with a gym and swimming pool, and the rest of the grounds into a retail park and townhouse development. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum had become Princess Manor Park and when I visited it in 2004 I wondered whether those currently sleeping in its soft beds were ever visited by the ghosts of former residents.