The Lunatics’ Common Room

2025 / ongoing

The Lunatics’ Common Room is an artistic engagement with the lives of those who found themselves deprived of their personal autonomy in mental asylums over the past three centuries. In defiance of attempts to simply reduce or limit them to the role of madman / madwoman, it explores them as unique individuals who have something to say to us now.

“We protest against any interference with the free development of delirium. It is as legitimate, as logical as any other sequence of human ideas or acts … Try and remember that tomorrow morning during your rounds, when, without knowing their language, you attempt to converse with people over whom, you must admit, you have only one advantage, namely force” - Antonin Artaud, Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums

“So what crime have I committed? Refusing the world: a crime punished by imprisonment in perpetuity.  They handle me like a crude bag of bones, stripped of all thought, all feeling.” - Valérie Valère, Le Pavillon des enfants fous

The imagery of this series draws upon the life, writings, and art of historic individuals, including John Thomas Perceval, Antonin Artaud, Unica Zürn, Bessie Head, Osamu Dazai and Valérie Valère, as well as the experiences of my uncle, and myself. In bringing fragments of the past into dialogue with the present, I seek to create an alternative space in which suppressed ontologies can be shared - I envision "The Lunatics' Common Room" as a space outside institutional boundaries, an imagined ‘room of our own’.