Outside In: London (exhibition opens 16 August)

On 16th August, this years Outside In: London exhibition opens at the CGP London Cafe Gallery in Bermondsey, and will run until 9 September (Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm). This exhibition of the work of eight non-traditional artists was selected from over 790 submissions to the Outside In: London competition. Outside In is organised by the award-winning Pallant House Gallery, home to one of the best Collections of modern British art in the country and widely recognised for its exemplary learning and community programme. The innovative project Outside In provides a platform for artists who find it difficult to access the art world because of mental health or other health issues, disability, social circumstance or because their work does not conform to traditional art norms. There are no set creative criteria for the artists that choose to align themselves with the project.

Alan Ramdhan is a student of the City Lit College in Covent Garden where he studies drawing, etching and painting. Alan’s work often depicts places that he has been to, and they contain a huge amount of detail in a very small space, often in graphite pencil.

Alan Streets was a Plein Air artist in New York City for 10 years. While in America a documentary was made about Alan titled, My name’s Alan and I paint pictures. Alan is now based in the UK, where he paints landscapes and imaginary scenes.

Albert began to draw during his years spent in hospital, working mainly in simple accessible mediums such as pen and pencil. He has said that these drawings act as a kind of meditation and a means of escaping boredom.

David Byrne creates multi-layered artworks by writing and rewriting his thoughts, often combining collage with pen and paint. He uses text from song lyrics, T.V programme titles, names of sitcom characters and pop stars within his works.

Kate Bradbury has received little acclaim from the mainstream art world. Some years ago, she began intuitively making pictures and assemblages from the abandoned belongings of previous unknown tenants and continues to this day.

Kim Noble feels, as an untrained artist, that her work comes from her heart not her head, and that she has learnt a lot about her other personalities through their artistic styles. Kim’s autobiography All of Me was published in October 2011 about her life with a personality disorder.

Linda Bell makes interactive artwork and mainly works in sculpture and installation. She frequently makes work which can be played with and whilst making she will experiment with ways of moving and engaging with a piece.

Phil Baird’s art career started when he first entered art school 40 years ago. He has exhibited and worked at art whenever he could, inter spaced by hospital admissions. Phil has focused on drawing for three years now, recently publishing the book Simple Complex Drawings.

Alan Streets - Watching Wolf

One of Many: Kim Noble Exhibition Opens on 9 November

Recently, we published a blog on Kim Noble’s autobiography, All of Me, in which we mentioned her paintings. This month, a complete exhibition of Kim’s work opens at the Bethlem Gallery. With no formal art training, Kim and 13 of her personalities (alters) became interested in painting in 2004. These 13 artists (alters) each have their own distinctive style, colours and themes; ranging from layered abstracts to challenging figurative works. Some of the work has a serene meditative quality to it whilst others contain explicit images of the trauma Kim endured in her youth. Many alters are unaware that they share a body with other artists.

“I paint from the heart not the head.” Says Noble. “D.I.D is a creative way to cope with unbearable pain.”

In the contemporary art world artists such as Gerhard Richter use a variety of aesthetics as a conscious statement to challenge the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style. Kim Noble’s motivations, however, lie in the unfathomable realm of the subconscious. Her work leads the viewer to question our understanding of the mind, and stands as a testament of her capacity to triumph over adversity.

The exhibition will open on November 9^th (3 – 6pm) and there will be an artist’s Q&A session and book signing at 2.30 pm on Saturday November 12th.

The show runs from 10 November until 2 December, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 11am – 6pm (and 11am – 6pm on Saturday 12th November).

 Meet the Gingers - Kim Noble (Suzy)

First Person Narratives 5

In August and September we published a string of posted entitled First Person Narratives. Today we present a short coda to this sequence; although in truth a series like this could go on and on. Last weekend’s Guardian drew attention to the story of the painter Kim Noble, the woman with 100 personalities. She has written a book charting her experience of dissociative identity disorder, one of the most contested psychiatric diagnoses of the nearly 300 that appear in the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. ‘I don’t ever know if I am coming or going’, she told the Guardian journalist. ‘I could switch [identities] at a door, like at the doctor’s surgery, and think, ‘Have I just been in?’

Coming or Going Man is the poignant title Kim (or ‘Abi’) gave to one of the works of art she contributed to the Outside In exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in 2009. It has since come into our collection here at the Archives & Museum. All of Me: My Incredible Story of How I Learned to Live with the Many Personalities Sharing my Body is published today by Piatkus Books.