A Treatment Journey, Resilience and Living in Boxes of Stone: Three short films by John.
Free and open to all.
This event is part of Bethlem Gallery’s Mental Health and Justice project.
After the success of the first screening last year, we are providing another opportunity to view A Treatment. Repurposing the institutional spaces around him as a studio and site for artistic enquiry, John presents video documentation of his creative interventions. These processes and acts form part of his ongoing attempts to explore and communicate the intricate complexities, contradictions and tensions felt by an individual navigating a psychiatric institution and pathway to recovery.
In Resilience John presents a new video work that explores the capacity of art making as a process to ease pressure, to vent and to release tension. Expression through art is both a strategy for coping and for asking questions of the institution that holds and cares for him.
About Bethlem Gallery’s Mental Health and Justice project:
Bethlem Gallery are at the beginning of a four year, Wellcome funded public programme. The gallery are working alongside a multi-disciplinary research team who are specifically interested in two principal areas of enquiry; the concept of support in decision-making and the concept of decision-making ability relating to mental health and the law. The Gallery’s aim is to engage service users and develop a framework for their perspectives – challenging the often exclusive or hierarchical conversations that have characterised the area. You can read about the first wave of artists here.