From images of empty community rooms and a colourful canvas crammed with caricatures to a baby linked by an umbilical-like cord to a seated stranger, artworks on the subject of mental health are to go on display in an exhibition that examines social bonds against the backdrop of today’s polarised times.
Artists have long drawn on their own experiences of mental ill health. Staged at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, in south-east London, Kindred will explore the power of communities to make people feel comforted as well as isolated.
Morning Group by the artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, painted when she was a patient at the Maudsley hospital, shows her horror of group therapy sessions. Three pieces by the contemporary artist Mud depict their journey from distrust to healing through therapy.
Charlotte Johnson Wahl, Morning Group, 1974. Photograph: Charlotte Johnson-Wahl/Bethlem Museum of the Mind
Gareth McConnell’s photographs of empty rooms are all waiting to be filled and transformed by therapy sessions.
Bethlem’s exhibitions officer, Rebecca Raybone, said the free show had evolved from the challenge the museum sector set to help social cohesion and social justice at a time when society and politics felt polarised.
“We thought it would be a really interesting topic to consider in terms of how that is related to mental health and mental health treatment,” she said. “Society can make you feel very alone sometimes, or can have the opposite effect of making you feel really part of something.”
Called Kindred to reflect the positivity of forming a bond with others, the exhibition also portrays negative aspects of groups. “Mental health is a journey, rather than a binary process. It’s important people find what works for them,” she said.
Johnson Wahl’s work “is very clearly a negative experience of group therapy”, Raybone said. “She was quite horrified by it and found it very intrusive. She has painted herself as the lady with the red hair. And has this look of horror and almost kind of ghostliness.”
Gareth McConnell, The Forth Universalist Society, New York, 2005, from a series of photographs of community meeting rooms. Photograph: Gareth McConnell/Sorika
McConnell’s photographs show rooms before community filled them. He said: “I sat in my first ever Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Wickham Park House [the now defunct detox unit at Bethlem Maudsley] in 1999 while undergoing a 28-day treatment plan for chronic intravenous poly-drug use. It was a room not dissimilar to the ones I later photographed – broken plastic chairs, lino floor, strip lighting – but, as I later came to realise, it was temporarily pervaded by the power of love, induced by the ritual/ceremony/meeting that took place.”
Mud, who has lived experience of borderline personality disorder and psychosis, said: “I firmly believe in the healing benefits of support from a community that understands and has been through similar things. I don’t think I’d be on my recovery journey today if it weren’t for other people helping me along the way.”
Other works on display include a large oil painting, The Group, by the late artist and art therapist Charles Lutyens; David Chick’s intricate People Trying to Reach Me (1986); Holding on to Daddy (2016) by the photographer Benji Reid, an image that won the Wellcome Trust photography prize 2020 in the mental health single image category; and the vibrant ceramics of the Chilean artist and former prisoner of conscience Bibi Herrera, who spent time in treatment at Bethlem.
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Mud, The Ending of Group Therapy. Photograph: Bethlem Museum of the Mind
Bethlem Royal hospital came into the NHS in partnership with the Maudsley hospital in 1948. The joint hospital formed the basis for what is now the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust.
The director of Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Colin Gale, said that “in a climate of political, cultural, and economic atomisation, social cohesion seems elusive”.
“The presence, or absence, of community is felt especially keenly in the face of mental health challenges. The artists whose work is represented in the collections of Bethlem Museum of the Mind represent this in a range of ways, arising from their diverse perspectives. ‘Listen to me, talk to me, understand me,’ they appear to say. ‘Don’t just medicate me.’”
