London exhibition to explore mental health and social bonds in ‘polarised’ times | Art

From images of empty community rooms and a colorful canvas filled with caricatures to a baby tied by an umbilical cord to a seated stranger, mental health-themed artwork will be on display in an exhibition that examines social connections in the context of today’s polarized times.

Artists have long drawn on their own experiences of poor mental health. Staged at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, south-east London, Kindred will explore the power of communities to make people feel both comfortable and isolated.

Morning Group by artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, Boris Johnson’s late mother, painted when she was a patient at Maudsley Hospital, shows her horror of group therapy sessions. Three works by contemporary artist Mud describe their journey from distrust to healing to therapy.

Gareth McConnell’s photographs of empty rooms are all waiting to be filled and transformed by therapy sessions.

Bethlem exhibitions manager Rebecca Raybone said the free exhibition was born out of the museum sector’s challenge to contribute to social cohesion and social justice at a time when society and politics felt polarized.

“We thought this would be a really interesting topic to consider in terms of how it relates to mental health and mental health treatment,” she said. “Society can sometimes make you feel very alone, or can have the opposite effect, making you feel really part of something.”

Called Kindred to reflect the positivity of connection with others, the exhibition also presents the negative aspects of groups. “Mental health is a journey rather than a binary process. It’s important that people find what works for them,” she said.

Johnson Wahl’s work “is very clearly a negative group therapy experience,” Raybone said. “She was quite horrified by it and found it very intrusive. She painted herself like the lady with the red hair. And has this look of horror and almost ghost.”

McConnell’s photographs show rooms before the community filled them. He said: “I attended my very first Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Wickham Park House. [the now defunct detox unit at Bethlem Maudsley] in 1999 while following a 28-day treatment plan for chronic polydrug use via intravenous use. It was a room not unlike those I later photographed – broken plastic chairs, linoleum flooring, strip lighting – but, as I later realized, it was temporarily imbued with the power of love, induced by the ritual/ceremony/meeting that was taking place.

Mud, who has lived experience with borderline personality disorder and psychosis, said: “I strongly believe in the healing benefits of supporting a community who understand and have experienced similar things. I don’t think I would be on my healing journey today if other people didn’t help 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 complex People Trying to Reach Me (1986); Holding on to Daddy (2016) by photographer Benji Reid, an image which won the 2020 Wellcome Trust Photography Prize in the mental health single image category; and the vibrant ceramics of Chilean artist and former prisoner of conscience Bibi Herrera, who spent time in treatment in Bethlem.

Bethlem Royal Hospital joined the NHS in partnership with Maudsley Hospital in 1948. The joint hospital formed the basis of what is today the South London Foundation Trust and the Maudsley NHS.

The director of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Colin Gale, said that “in a climate of political, cultural and economic atomization, social cohesion seems elusive.”

“The presence, or absence, of community is particularly felt in the face of mental health issues. The artists whose work is represented in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind’s collections represent it in various ways, based on their diverse perspectives. ‘Listen to me, talk to me, understand me,’ they seem to say. ‘Don’t just treat me.'”