Curatorial Conversations V

During a recent consultation held in conjunction with our proposed museum relocation project, staff and consultants have spoken to a wide range of people, including current and former mental health service users, hospital staff, carers and local interest groups, about their ideas for the new museum. One session with a peer-led ‘Hearing Voices’ group was particularly inspirational, indicating just how creative a ‘museum of the mind’ might be, as well as the value that such a museum might hold for some service users: a chance to increase understanding of their condition by sharing their experiences.

The discussion indicated many of the ways in which perceptions of museums have altered in the past decades. The group (many of whom often visited art galleries) preferred interactive exhibits within a clean, modern, welcoming building to traditional display cases and period buildings. Sound and video installations were regarded as vital, and the best means of portraying ‘hearing voices’ to those who had never had such experiences was discussed.

One of the most challenging issues a ‘hearing voices’ display would have to confront is how to effectively portray an ‘average’ experience, at the same time making it clear that the experience of every mental health service user is unique. Perhaps an interactive exhibit could confront this issue? Shared experiences might be viewed through a large-screen video installation, for example, in which the viewer follows the path of a camera around a locked in-patient ward on a journey through the hospital from locked door to meds hatch. A lack of dialogue would suggest the common nature of such a journey. Yet to add a sense of the unique nature of patient experiences, visitors might remove headphones from the model of a head in order to listen to a recording of ‘voices’. Taking up headphones would suggest to visitors that they are sharing the experience of one of many individuals, among whom even similar symptoms may vary considerably.

Human, All Too Human 3

Blog readers who took up last week’s invitation to identify the emotions represented in the photographic portraits of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, and who have time to spare in London during the twelve days of Christmas, might be interested in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in the South Bank Centre. George Condo’s Mental States is an exhibition of ‘imaginary portraits’ which have the capacity (according to the Gallery’s blurb) to ‘arouse our horror, fascination and delight’ as well as ‘solicit our empathy as we come to sense that their extreme mental states echo familiar aspects of our own natures’. It is a travelling exhibition, having already been on display in New York and Rotterdam, and opened in Frankfurt in February.

What is more, the Hayward is giving visitors the opportunity to write their own labels for the works on display – an opportunity not unlike the one offered by the Darwin Correspondence Project, and an exercise in empathy which is altogether appropriate for the season, it might be thought. A selection of these responses is highlighted on the exhibition website.

Mental States runs until 8 January 2012.

In the Spotlight: Wilhelmina Geddes

Last month’s caveat against presuming that the wards of Bethlem and the Maudsley were overloaded with writers and artists notwithstanding, this month’s post is devoted to an Arts and Craft Movement-era designer and stained glass artist of distinction. Irish-born Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955) was acclaimed by contemporaries for “producing the finest, the most sincerely, passionately religious stained glass of our time”, and even won grudging admiration from those critics who thought her work “too modern” or “experimental”.¹

Most of Geddes’ works in stained glass are (unsurprisingly) to be found in churches – principally in England and Ireland, but there are also windows in each of Wales, Belgium, Canada and New Zealand. Her treatment of her subjects, whether sacred or secular, is rugged, heroic, monumental. Geddes’ move from Ireland to England at the age of thirty-eight could be considered the hinge of her career. She had previously visited London on study trips and commissions, but her relocation there in 1925 was permanent.

The move had been contemplated for some time, but in the event it was brought about by a doctor’s referral to the Maudsley Hospital from Downpatrick Asylum, County Down, to which Geddes had admitted herself out of fears concerning her own mental health. For six months the Maudsley provided her with the medication, psychotherapy, refuge and space for the recovery she sought. Yet Geddes was not idle during this time. Having brought a commission from a Surrey church for a stained glass window with her from Ireland, she began design work while still in hospital. Following her discharge in November 1925, she rented a studio in Fulham which was to become her working base for the remainder of her life.

This post is the penultimate in the In the Spotlight series, which we launched at the start of 2011. As the accompanying picture is of Geddes’ The Angel Appearing to Joseph (now in Ely Cathedral’s Stained Glass Museum), we take the seasonal opportunity to wish the readers of this blog all the best for Christmas and the New Year.

¹ Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘A Window with Punch’, Apollo Magazine (September 2008), pp 74-79. Nicola Bowe’s biography of Geddes is scheduled for publication in 2012 by Four Courts Press in Dublin. We will let our readers know when it is published. Bowe is giving a lecture on Wilhelmina Geddes in Monaco on 26 January 2012; details of how to how to book are online here.

© Stained Glass Museum, Ely. Used with permission.

Human, All Too Human 2

[ continued from previous post ]

Cambridge University is recreating online an experiment originally conducted by Charles Darwin with dinner party guests in his living room in Downe, Kent. In a letter written upon returning from an evening at Down House, one visitor described how “Mr Darwin brought in some photographs taken by a Frenchman, galvanising certain muscles in an old man’s face, to see if we read aright the expression that putting such muscles in play should produce”.

These photographs were none other than those taken and published by Duchenne, and later used as plates in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). For over a century the data tables collated by the naturalist were, in the words of Peter Snyder, Professor of Neurology at Brown University, “buried in a box in the library in Cambridge”. Now Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project is giving online visitors the same chance that Darwin’s dinner guests had to identify the emotions represented in Duchenne’s portraits. The results of the online poll will be compared to those obtained by Darwin and published on the Project website.

In time, data like this might enable computer recognition of facial expressions indicative of a range of emotions to inform automated teaching tools, for example, or even satellite navigation systems. The possibility that arises of a nineteenth century experiment put to a contemporary purpose is fascinating. Yet the use that was made of these portraits by author Mark Haddon at the Natural History Museum in 2009 (as mentioned in the previous post in this series) is equally poignant.

Rather than inventing biographical narratives for each of the Darwin’s photographic subjects, Haddon wrote a series of brief but evocative vignettes to illustrate the various emotions with which they are respectively associated (which are preserved for posterity in the published exhibition catalogue). His limpid narrative foregrounds the human, all too human, quality these portraits share, and – in the words of one exhibition reviewer – lends the subjects “a presence, you could say a raison d’etre, in prose”.¹

¹ Laura Cumming, Take that look off your face… The Observer on Sunday, 26 July 2009.

Photograph from the Natural History Museum’s After Darwin exhibition, 2009

This Is Your Hospital: New Web Resource

The Archives and Museum launches a new web learning resource this weekend, This is Your Hospital, devoted to the middle twenty years of the life of Warlingham Park Hospital. Central to this resource are extracts from a documentary commissioned by the Archives and Museum which combines archive footage and interviews. The documentary was screened for the first time on 10 October, World Mental Health Day, as part of the BBCs ‘Reel History of Britain’ festival, and the Archives and Museum are grateful to the Trustees of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Langley Park Boys School in Beckenham without whose support this event would not have been possible. The website also includes photographs, scanned archive documents and patient files, and further learning resources for use in schools will soon be added.

Opened in 1903 as Croydon Mental Hospital, Warlingham Park Hospital was closed in 1999 in common with many other mental hospitals, but remains an important element of local history. The website aims to share the stories of local people: whether former patients, staff or simply members of the surrounding community. The title, ‘This is Your Hospital’ reflects the ideas of Dr T.P. Rees, the Hospital’s Medical Superintendent from 1935 to 1956, who was in the habit of encouraging patients to make some contribution to the life of the Hospital, and to think of it as belonging to them. “People come to a mental hospital”, he used to say, “to learn how to live”. The experiences of some of these people appear in film clips and written reports, and we hope that the resource will grow over time as more stories are added.

Do you have memories of living or working at Warlingham Park Hospital that you would like to share with others? Or do you have an ancestor who was a patient or a member of staff? Visit the website to share your stories.