Voices through paint: exhibition at historic English Asylum
England’s oldest psychiatric hospital is presenting the never-before-exhibited creations of its patients as part of a new exhibition dedicated to sleep, dreams, and nightmares. Dead squirrels, ghostly visions, and disturbing night thoughts: A new exhibition by Bethlem explores how patients have long struggled with sleep and nightmares through art.
The exhibition “Between Sleep and Reality” at the Museum of Mind in Bethlehem showcases artworks created over the past 200 years by patients from psychiatric hospitals. The exhibition features a variety of stories on canvases, ranging from an ode to a deceased pet squirrel, written by a man who once attempted to assassinate George III, to modern installations created from sheets covered with disturbing nighttime thoughts.
The museum, located on the grounds of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, which has been in operation since 1403 and has served as a source of inspiration for countless creators of images of madness in culture, including “Bedlam,” a 1946 horror film starring Boris Karloff, combined these works of art with research on the most common types of dreams shared across cultures.
“We took the work of sleep researchers as a basis and developed a taxonomy of dreams that are most common in different societies and cultures,” explains Colin Gale, director of the Museum of the Mind in Bethlehem. “And then we turned to our museum’s rich art collection and found a painting that sort of illustrates each of these archetypes.”
One of the most striking works of the exhibition is who was treated in London in the early 1950s. Visit. A F R I N I K . C O M . For the full article. His paintings became a dialogue with doctors, an attempt to visually describe inner fears.
“He painted scenes for his doctors in which he tried to explain to them all his experiences and difficulties, and in particular, this picture called “Nightmare” is a collection of all the numerous nightmares that haunted him at that time,” says Gale. Up close, the picture becomes even more disturbing. “This one… It’s an alarming image of how he imagines what it would be like if his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, were in his power and he smashed his head with a stone,” Gail notes. The exhibition also focuses on the experience of insomnia.
Kate McDonnell’s installation “Night Tides” is monumental: it consists of blankets, pillowcases, and bed linen covered with crazy, looping lines of text — irrational worries that pop up in the wee hours.
According to McDonnell “This work is about insomnia and the strange state we find ourselves in in the middle of the night. It is made of blankets, pillowcases, and bed linen, and all this is covered with those disturbing thoughts that visit us, that irrational strangeness that insomnia generates. And many of my works embody unpleasant, intangible feelings,” .
