In 2018 I began a series of paintings based on Victorian women committed to Mental Asylums. Up to this point the women I painted were fictional, although if probed I would probably admit they were self-portraits. I had been painting lone women for some time and retrospectively I can now see as a late diagnosed Audhd woman that these women were representations of a heavily camouflaged self. There was an aura of melancholia and detachment to the women. They always sat alone, rarely able to make eye contact, lost in their own thoughts and reverie.
For as long as I can recall I have always been searching for the truth of why I am what I am, always feeling on the periphery, an outcast, other, never fitting in as a woman, a Jew, a mother, an artist, a therapist. So it seems entirely appropriate to be drawn to a group of women that had been outcast by society, shut away because they refused to fit into society’s expectations of how women ought to behave.
I cannot remember how I chanced upon it but in this particular search I read Phylis Cheslers ‘Women And Madness’ as well as Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady. It was in the latter book that I learnt of Dr Diamond, a psychiatrist and keen amateur photographer. He worked at Sussex Mental Asylum and used his time there to practice what was a brand new invention, setting up a photography studio in the grounds and then photographing countless female patients. He would give the women props and for one of the photographs he handed a woman a book to read, however if you look closely the book is upside down. (The painting in the Asylum Women series is inspired by this particular photograph titled ‘Reader’).
I tracked the original photographs to Bedlam Hospital, set in vast grounds and still working as an NHS mental health hospital deep in South London. In one of the buildings I sat in a small room on my own, was handed white gloves and was allowed to draw from them, all archived in heavy leather bound books. It was from these simple pencil drawings, photographs and reference books that I went on to create five paintings.
Painting these women came at a time of great creative turmoil for me, a global pandemic followed and then a two year full time painting course with the main objective of completely dismantling and changing the way I worked. I like to think that the work I make now is the inner workings of these women’s (my) mind, making the internal external so to speak, what they were really thinking as they sat there seemingly composed and still.
The Asylum Women paintings are now all hung in my lounge and myself and my family have them as company as we watch tv, read and listen to music. Ironically my husband loves the company of these women, my daughter finds them unnerving and I look at them and see myself in them and feel a deep connection.
