Well what I see is…

Earlier this week I watched BBC 4’s ‘British Art at War’ programme on Walter Richard Sickert and was particularly struck by his choice to exhibit a picture under the title ‘Summer Afternoon’ then later ‘What shall we do about the rent?’ and finally as part of a group entitled ‘The Camden Town Murder.’ The same image but a very different viewing experience.

While I was in hospital I would often show the poems and untitled pictures in my sketch books to staff as a way to connect and to try and communicate my experience of being on the ward. I noticed that there were a few pictures that people tended to like on sight and be uncomfortable with when I explained what the image was about for me.  I’d like to share a couple of them with you here:

What do you see in this picture?

When I drew it I was trying to explain the way wearing a ligature affected my emotions. There are many excellent ways to sooth yourself that do not come with the huge risks of what I was doing.  The message I was trying to convey was that my experience was that it took me from a distressed and tangled emotional place to a quieter calmer and easier one.  The experience for people who saw me do it however was very different.

 

This was a picture that staff often commented that they liked. Some people said that it reminded them of the ‘Despicable Me’ Minions.  I drew it when I was on a PICU and really struggling.  I was being restrained very often to prevent me from hurting myself.  The three heads came from the view I sometimes got looking up at the two people holding my arms and the person holding my head.  In my distress it took a real effort to recognise even people that I knew well.  I had drawn this image to try to ‘stick it to the paper’ and stop my mind jumping back to it at unexpected moments.  So for me it’s a scary picture.

As part of the Creative Personalities group at Leeds Art Gallery we explore particular works and exhibitions with the Community Curator. One thing we’ve done is to go into the gallery of narrative paintings and ignoring the label tell our own stories about what we see happening there.  I found the idea that what I see is totally valid, whether or not it is what the artist originally tried to convey, very exciting when viewing art but rather scary when I’m putting my own creative work out there.

However it’s interesting to see how same piece of work can be ‘about’ many different things depending on the context over a short space of time.

For instance I wrote ‘A Feel Better Poem’ earlier this year with the Nurse who was doing my 1:1 observations that hour. She wrote one line and I wrote the next.   It had been a difficult day on the PICU and the poem was literally about making ourselves feel better.

Just before I left the hospital I had leave to attend the opening of and Exhibition at Armley Mills in Leeds with Creative Personalities since our sculpture ‘Unhinged’ was being exhibited. During the event I was asked if I had any work I wanted to display at the upcoming Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Network Learning Event.  The theme was to be involvement.  Asked the Nurse I had written it with for permission and she very kindly (and rather bravely) said that I could do anything I wanted with the poem.

With the involvement theme the fact that we had been equal partners in writing the poem became an important aspect. I performed my own lines and another member of the group performed those written by the nurse and on the display copy I had put her lines in pink and mine in green to stress the conversational aspect of it.

I was preparing the poem for the Network Learning Event in my first week at home after months on the PICU. It became very much part of my transition and I had the idea of creating an illustrated video on YouTube as a way to publicly thank the team and everyone else who works in psychiatric intensive care for all they do.  I recorded it as one single set of suggestions to the listener but the people in the images were based on the two authors and when I reached the ‘stunning old dears’ picture I chose the hair and glasses accordingly!  At that time it was about feeling better by keeping a connection of some sort to people who had been a huge part of my life for a long time now that I wasn’t with them anymore.

After I published it things started to change again. People asked me if they could share it with people that they thought would find it helpful which delighted me.  When I shared the video my tags gradually shifted from focussing on purely PICUs, Mental Health and hospitals, to include self-help.  A friend from Creative Personalities asked if the ‘Stunning Old Dears’ were based on anyone! From then on that picture also made me think of the excitement and laughter we have together.  For me the poem and video became a message to myself that would help me keep going through the hard times in the future.  I began to play it when I was struggling and it helped.

During this time I was asked if the Video could be played on a loop at the Mental Health Trusts Annual Members Meeting on the inpatient services stand. When I arrived at that stall on the day they told me that they had had some really nice comments and that it was good to have something to show the positive support and care that happen on psychiatric wards as well as the pain, frustration and emotional turmoil.

‘A Feel Better Poem’ is all these things to me and will be these and many more to those who view it whatever the context.